nb_leftist's reviews
357 reviews

I liked it. Miller does an incredible job with dialogue and, although there is some weird stuff in here (particularly the racism towards the Romani person referred to as the G-slur, and the overplayed commentary on the dehumanization of the), the commentary on the banality of evil is quite compelling.

Definitely not the best comic I’ve read, the art is bland in places, and I wish it had more to say, but I still liked it. 

I always love finding more cyberfeminist stuff, though I do think this makes some of the same mistakes as Gender Nihilism where it doesn’t focus too much on the material reasons why gender is enforced and argues for refusal. I do still like it a lot though. I really enjoy the focus on art.

Interesting. It's super informative and, since reading this, I've realized that mainstream linguistics (focusing on language trees, syntax, etc.) are not super interesting to me. Instead, I enjoy thinking about the mental process of understanding language. I also like thinking about the methods of power always present in language. Neither of these are really focused on in this text but I did not expect those to be focused on.

I cannot remember which piece of Arundhati Roy’s which I read first, I believe one of her pieces was included in “Intersectionality: Foundations and Frontiers” and I remember liking it. Although I did like the writing style and there was a lot of info I did not know about India, the ideas were not new. This does not necessarily say anything bad about Arundhati Roy because I have read a lot, but still important to note for myself. Worth a read.

I love Markuse. I read One-Dimensional Man earlier this year, and as he says in the introduction, this essay is a combination of Eros and Thanatos and One-Dimensional Man, and is (slightly) more accessible to a broad audience. I liked it but none of it was new (since I read One-Dimensional Man), definitely worth a read.

This is my rewrite of this review because I accidentally deleted my first one and cannot get it back :(

I was so excited for—and then disappointed by—this one. I assumed it was going to focus more on building local community through focuses on care and a rejection of neoliberal capitalist profit-motives. Instead it is a generic call for globalist capitalism to be “re-regulated” and for it to rely on “care” rather than profit. It does not provide any plan of action and follows the age-old leftist tradition of saying that we have an opportunity right now, as if it will be slightly easier than it would have been when we didn’t have “an opportunity.” It also praises AOC as bringing care back into the mainstream, which may have been the thing in 2020 for some leftists, but reading it now after AOC’s condemnation of Palestinian liberation struggles rings wack.

At best, this is a good introduction for sympathetic liberals who want to get into leftist literature, but I would give something else as this is quite surface level and still ends at a conclusion of social-democrat reform rather than the needed revolution. Sad day, I was excited for this one :( 

I don’t really have much to say, and the stuff I do have to say has certainly been said before. My absolute favorite piece is the interview between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, the way they establish the connections between her piece on the erotic and her piece on poetry as a necessity made those piece significantly more interesting. I also cannot get over the piece on the erotic or the piece on learning from the 60s.

Her writing is not only important for its contents, but it feels important to read. It makes the reader themselves feel important. 

Although I picked this book up because I wanted more of a direct guide to dealing with these issues (not what this book is), I have come to realize that there is never going to be something like that. Intimate violence, abuse, “toxicity”, and manipulation are much more complicated and individual than any one-size-fits-all guide could provide for. Even with this realization, I still wish there was more direct stories of community accountability rather than stories of abuse (which are incredibly important).

I don’t really have much else to say, the collection is incredibly important and I am quite proud that I read it . It is similar to Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown and, because I read it after reading Emergent Strategy, I consider it a building on what was written about there.

The version I read included the Anti-Manifesto, it’s Addendum, and “Beyond Negativity” (a follow up essay Escalante wrote ~1 year after Gender Nihilism).

I have read this before, probably around a year ago(?) and it was my first real encounter with gender abolitionist ideas. Since then I have written an essay or two on gender abolition and, because of that research, I’ve read up on Gender Acceleration, Gender Nihilism, and Xenifeminism, which are all  different areas or theories of gender abolition. In my opinion, I prefer Gender Accelerationism as I believe it has the most materialist understanding of Gender, but all of them being valuable critiques to the table. Gender Nihilism, for example, focuses on the ideological categorization of the gender apparatus but does not provide any real solutions. Escalante agrees with this and, in “Beyond Negativity”, seems to take a position closer to Gender Acceleration than in Gender Nihilism. 

As I said, I have written essays on gender abolition, and I could do it again, but I’ll refrain from doing that. I’d recommend checking this out as it’s short and free online.