The Tin Men Blog - Lemmygrad
lemmygrad.ml
I am in no way associated with the creator(s?) of The Tin Men Blog. This is community solely for reposting their very useful infographics.

The owner has locked it to only allow them to post. That’s fine, but all posts they’ve made so far they’ve also locked at zero comments to disallow the community to interact with those posts.

This goes against the purpose of lemmy(grad) in my opinion which is interaction and discussion. If the person behind this wants to post static things without feedback they’d be better served by hosting a website and hoping people stumble on it.

It’s one thing for admins to lock posts at their discretion because of an nonconstructive turn to discussion or because it’s an announcement and they don’t want fighting over their rules that they’ve decided on. Likewise for mods to not allow comments on a rules post or shut down discussion when it becomes unproductive.

The content is also somewhat sketchy feeling. I admit it’s true that there can be issues with female on male relationship violence not being taken seriously but such statistics are often pushed to silence and tamp down on the overwhelming societal issue which is in fact male on female violence within and outside of relationships. To shout down feminists with “men can be raped too” is like shouting down black lives matter with “all lies matter” or “white people experience police violence too”.

Honestly it rings alarm bells. There’s nothing wrong about talking about gendered violence towards men and boys, but this site seems to frame it in terms of persecution, in terms of there being some sort of feminist agenda to silence and shut down discussion on these matters.

Take for example this link from the blog this community models itself on: https://thetinmen.blog/we-are-not-violent/

In it they feature researchers who claim they received bomb threats, had their dogs shot, were shouted down by feminists. All of this rings alarm bells in my head that these people are likely reactionaries using progressive language as a cover. It uses the classic reactionary tact of claiming repression. They claim to have studies showing female on male violence in families being equal to male on female violence. Which is on its face a dishonest framing. Sure women may shout (verbal abuse) and with dishonest twisting of terminology you can over-count aggressive but not actually violent or dangerous behavior and use it to try and equal out men who give women black eyes. But you can’t hide the homicide rates and those show us that women and girls are far more frequently murdered by men and boys than the inverse.

Once more, it’s not that gendered violence towards men and boys doesn’t exist, it’s that gendered violence towards women and girls is much more severe, prevalent, has within our lifetime been the subject of tv-tropes and jokes (slapping a “hysterical woman” to calm her down as just one example) and has more severe consequences such as girls and women being attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.

Rape against men and boys is unacceptable, coercion for sex is unacceptable. But the fact is men and boys are the overwhelming committers in volume of sexual violence on women and girls that is actually physically violent, forceful, etc. Men for the most part merely feel a social pressure on their status to agree to sex with women, that they’ll be less of a man if they don’t agree. Every request from men and boys towards women and girls carries an implicit fall-back of violence, even lethal levels of it for rejecting a male, for denying them sex, intimacy, a relationship, etc and women and girls live with that every day, every encounter in the back of their minds. While such violence towards men and boys does not define their lived experiences, they do not naturally due to a felt prevalence assume that denying a girl intimacy, a relationship, or sex will likely result in her escalating to violence and the potential of bodily harm and danger.

Not taking that reality, that material and historical reality into account when discussing gendered violence makes one dishonest.

The site is evasive in what it talks about, it frames itself as for progressive rights of men and boys and what woman can oppose that? Not I. I’m all for men having conversations about healthy masculinity, reform, male solidarity that isn’t to the exclusion of women but looks like support for men by men. But it feels off and the fact the owner has locked any ability to discuss it also adds to the ringing alarm bells. Truthfully if they hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have spent 10 minutes looking over a few things there and realizing it felt sketchy.

It seems like a lot of this sketchy stuff is papered over and hidden between bland, no analysis, uninteresting, unenlightening, surface level feminist-friendly stuff like roe-v-wade being overturned being bad but then just throwing some statistics out and not really getting into any analysis or insight.

Here’s an example of more problematic stuff: https://thetinmen.blog/just-be-you/

“I want to define myself by who I am. Not as a feminist, an MRA or egalitarian, as left, or right, liberal or conservative.”

It’s alarming that MRA is mentioned as a possibility as if egalitarian which is used by the manosphere to disguise their hatred of women.

And one last one: https://thetinmen.blog/soft-power-and-the-henpecked-husband/

Which seems to downplay the power and reality of patriarchy.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds of the content and it’s merits. Because even if the content were incredibly uncontroversial and in no world could be considered sketchy or one-sided, even if it were something we all agreed upon as Marxist-Leninists just by our nature, the lack of ability for discussion is in my opinion against the intended nature and function of lemmy.

If you’re going to post something here you have to deal with people replying, even disagreeing with you. You don’t have to respond, you don’t have to even look at their responses if you don’t want to, you can chuck something out there into the feed and then ignore all discussion. But others should be able to.

I ask admins to consider whether this content should be here and whether this community should exist given two separate issues:

  1. The locking of the whole community against interaction and just using it as a posting board for someone’s stuff which seems counter to lemmy’s intentions and function.

  2. The questionable content present

edit 13 hours in: Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think this rises to a case of global rules violation, hatred, misogyny and the OP and sole moderator should be appropriately sanctioned. No benefit of the doubt is deserved given the language they used on the sidebar about the stuff they were posting being useful

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
      7·
      8 months ago

      Just to recontextualize nameless partisan, they weren’t banned for changing their name, we understood it as a provocation (which they had been doing for a while), but they were banned for a different reason which was the conclusion for the culmination of 5 months of trying to provoke the mod team without ever wanting to engage in dialogue. I previously wrote about it here: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/2650277

      I have changed my stance on the communist party of ‘israel’ since then, though I still think there’s some amount of depth to its existence, but they really dropped the ball on October 7 lol. Regardless it’s not a big point in the events around this user.

      edit: otherwise I agree completely with point number 2, I would have made it myself lol. With the tools we have at our disposal we do the best we can, I think in general the community is good at self-moderating as seen from this thread. It leads to a culture of self-responsibility. And yeah, we (I) have no interest in doing extensive research on every new account to make sure they’re not an alt. The general rule of thumb is that if we can’t tell they’re an alt then what’s the harm? If they got banned the first time they’ll get banned a second time under a different account, they’ll slip up eventually. Unless they actually changed and improved, in which case we won’t ban them. And in the meantime we run the risk of banning a completely innocent person based on conjecture.

        • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
          4·
          8 months ago

          That’s strange, maybe because OP deleted their account and so it deleted the post as well except for mods. I’ll paste my comment:

          That is not what happened at all. It’s what Nameless_Partisan claimed happened.

          Partisan had always been heated and quick to ban on the community they created. Early on they showed they were not open to discussion on their opinions. This is fine, we don’t police how people carry themselves. But it shows their personality. They were not banned for this behaviour.

          Later they went into a diatribe against another user on the Palestine community, completely unprompted, after that person asked for advice. The person in question was an Israeli communist and I know that raises a lot of eyebrows (it did to me too) but there is a lot of depth to Israeli communists, most of them being Palestinians who were naturalized after Nakba, and the communist party of Israel calling for the dissolution of this state. This attack was unprompted and I was the one who banned them for a measly 3 days and only from the Palestine community for a violation of rule 3. Not difficult to find it was me in the modlog as I’m the only mod of the Palestine community and I also told them in the comments, to which they never replied but later brought up in their farewell post, leaving it stirring without wanting to engage with us (the admins) as had always been the case.

          They could have taken the time to ask the person in question what it meant to them to be a communist in such a country, etc, but instead decided to start attacking a comrade on Lemmygrad out of nowhere.

          We built a community here and while we don’t ask users where they come from there is some basic level of comradeship that builds itself with the account vetting system in place and the fact that we’re all MLs. If you can’t even afford that basic amount of politeness to anyone then yes, that is a breach of rule 3.

          But their comment to the user in question was not deleted. Nameless instead deleted their entire comment history later on so I couldn’t even tell you what they told that Israeli person.

          Their comment that was deleted was essentially saying it was okay to kill Israeli children. An admin decided to remove it as it could bring trouble to Lemmygrad. But we’ve never deleted comments about targetting settlers or calling for the end of Israel, etc. We make these comments ourselves too.

          They were not banned for this comment, it was merely deleted. This is also around the time they changed their bio in their profile to say “Banned for being mean to an israeli colonizer.” but again a- they did not know if that person was a colonizer (and if they don’t know that there are Arabs with second-class Israeli citizenship then they are not qualified to speak so much about Palestine) and b- they were temp banned from a single community.

          They were also not called a terrorist but their comment was deleted for advocating terrorism. This might seem pedantic, but the distinction is important. Calling someone a terrorist is an accusation. Deleting a comment for advocating terrorism is not placing the blame on them, just that the wording of the comment, while accidental, came off this way. This is when they renamed their account as “mean_arab_terrorist”.

          Later, they made their farewell post where they brought their version of events, but we debunked it there as well, and Partisan never once replied to the comments.

          Since their original farewell post was locked, someone made a different post in Comradeship to talk about that farewell post. Edit: found it again: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/617510

          When you put all of this together it starts to look like they were more interested in stirring up trouble than actually engaging with the platform, most of the time posting in their own community from which they indiscriminately banned people who disagreed with them. But again, this is not a bannable offense on Lemmygrad as there are plenty of other communities to participate on.

          Despite this, Partisan was not banned from the website and the entire admin team was in agreement that they were not easy to manage, so to speak, but that nothing was ban-worthy by itself. What was problematic to us was that at no point did NP try to contact us to explain their issues, instead preferring to indirectly talk at us by changing their display name or profile bio. I don’t think they ever once replied to any of my comments either.

          They came back 3 months after that farewell post, which they locked right after they made it (but we did not touch in any way), to say in Arabic “May God’s peace, mercy, and blessings be upon you. I am a Shiite. I no longer participate on this site because it is occupied by Satan. May God protect you.”

          Totally a normal thing to say 3 months after you made your goodbyes and you got the slightest slap on the wrist for not obeying the site rules which are prominently displayed.

          Someone reported that comment and that is when Partisan finally got banned from Lemmygrad for inciting trouble on a website that they willingly left.