No problem! I hope that you’re able to find a job and can keep your house, but it’s nice that you have your parents to fall back on if it doesn’t work out.

Fwiw, I’ve given up on dating and it’s been very good for my mental health. I was spending a lot of time trying to find an SO, but lately I’ve been putting that time into hobbies instead and have been much happier. If I bump into someone, I’m open to dating, but that’s not the goal (or the desire, even. Dating is a lot of work)

Obviously, that may not be an option for you, but something to consider.

Best of luck!

Thank you so much!!!

I’ve recently started dipping my toes into writing, and I can’t think of a compliment I’d like to receive more than the one you gave. Thank you.

Woof. Yeah that’s tough :/ I’m sorry you’re feeling so low. Congrats on the temp gig though!

have to live with my parents as a 30 year old

Is this mostly a pride thing, or are your parents bad people?

No one I can talk to

Fear not! You have access to dozens, maybe even HUNDREDS of terminally online communists!

No real motivation to even try anymore

Burnout is the devil. I hope you can recharge

within the last few days I’ve come to question my sexuality

Exciting!!! That does seem like a challenging situation re: not being a chaser, and honestly idk the answer. The fact that you’re worried about being one is a good sign, though! Maybe ask here how to respectfully date trans women?

My (cishet) opinion is that you should try it out if you’re able. As long as it’s between consenting adults, there’s no “wrong” sexuality, and never questioning the default is lame.

I can only see it getting worse and that’s what gets me

Yeah… that’d get me too. By “it” do you mean your specific situation, or things in general?

If it’s the former, at least you have a whole new world of sexuality to explore!

If it’s the latter, I’ve made a couple posts about my optimism, but I understand the call of doomerism.

Do you mind if I ask what’s going on?

“What do you do?” may have the connotation of being about work, but the literal words are actually a great conversation starter. You are falling into the same trap if you answer “nothing” because you don’t do wage labor.

You don’t do nothing! How dare you!!

You organize online!
You learn about socialism!
You’re working your ass off to try to get healthier!
You need to rest and recover more than some folks, but that’s not nothing!

If you want to change the culture, answer the literal question, not the question they think they’re asking.

If they follow up with “I meant for work,” then give them a face and say you can’t work bc of your disability. Simple as.

Spiders Georg but for chocolate

Oh hell yeah I love an emergent property. That’s my new favorite theory

Organizing people is just as important, if not more.

What is “organizing” beyond education?

Yes, there needs to be material action behind it, and I’m saying that there already is, it just needs to be pointed in the right direction.

A hundred million people are frothing at the mouth to deport as many people as possible, and I submit that it is not out of hate.

WHY does “immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country” resonate with people?

It is not because they really really hate Mexicans. Some do, of course, but not enough to build a mass movement.

It resonates with people because the blood of this country IS poisoned. This country is possessed by a demon, and it needs an exorcism. And people feel this.

And they are trying to fix it.

They are organized.
They are taking material actions.
They are willing to sacrifice.

Capital sees this happening, and it is terrified. It NEEDS to direct revolutionary energy away from itself, and so it conjures up a boogeyman.

It needs to be something pervasive, but immaterial. Something ubiquitous, yet divisive. A fight that must never end.

It needs to split the people in two, point them at each other, and let them take their revolutionary energy out on each other. The two sides should be perfectly balanced so no that no real progress is ever made, but also unstable so that each side feels like it might be able to win if it just tries a little harder.

Democrats get too powerful? No problem, whip up some hate for a minority on fox news. Republicans get too powerful? No problem, time to run some stories on hate crimes.

Every presidential election is close. Elections swing back and forth every few years.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s evidence.

I don’t like it any more than you do, but MAGA is part of the revolutionary class, and we need to start acting like it.

Finally, the internet is not a direct line of communication to everyone. It reaches only a specific demographic. You can’t rely solely on it to build a mass movement.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

It is literally, materially a direct line of communication to everyone. It is a revolution in communication on par with the printing press.

CAPITAL has built the internet into echo chambers.
CAPITAL told us that we hate each other.
CAPITAL has algorithmically split us into factions that do not talk to each other.

What would Lenin have been able to accomplish if What Is To Be Done? could have been published online?
How much more effective would the movement have been if he had a YouTube channel?
What if the greatest minds across Europe at the time could have hopped on a video call to discuss strategy?
What if the soviets had a subreddit?

We’re playing on easy mode, y’all.

R.I.P. capitalism, good luck making it to 2030.

nutritional needs

looks inside

all seven essential food groups studied: grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, meat, staples, and fish

Sorry vegans, looks like you can’t meet your nutritional needs :smuglord:

Do you mind sharing why you think that?

Some don’t, but it’s a vast minority. It’s certainly not the prevailing belief on reddit.

The belief “women have no value, and are only useful as sex objects,” is fringe, redpill, loser shit.

The belief “attractive women are more valuable than unattractive women” is peak reddit.

I can’t think of a belief that more succinctly describes the problem with reddit.

I have honestly never been more bloomer in my life.

EVERYONE is thinks things suck.
EVERYONE is pissed.
EVERYONE is trying to do something about it.

The only problem is that people don’t know why things suck, or how to make it better.

Fascists think things suck because of [minority], and so they want to get rid of [minority].

Liberals think things suck because of the fascists, and so would like everyone to just play nice and we can work this all out, please.

But WE know.
WE know the problem! IT’S CAPITALISM!!!
WE know the solution! KILL CAPITALISM!!!

If everyone in the world woke up tomorrow and knew what we know, the suffering would stop.

The collective rage that we see in society would be directed at the true enemy instead of each other, and nothing in the world is more powerful than people working together to solve their problem.

The only thing we must do to win, the only thing that truly matters, is to get everyone to understand.

History has blessed us with the ultimate weapon.

A material power that Marx and Lenin and Sankara and Newton could not dream of wielding in their wildest fantasies.

NOW is the moment in history for revolution.
Capitalism WILL fall in our lifetimes.
I’ll be surprised if it lasts twenty years.

The contradictions have become undeniable.
The people want change, they just need direction.

And for the first time in history, we have a direct line to every single one of them.

Don’t you DARE quit on us.
We need everyone we can get.

Now get back to posting, soldier.

Unpopular opinion: critical support.

Hear me out.

More than anything, this pattern is caused by patriarchy.

Racism is obviously at play, but it only adds flavor. Someone mentioned people mourning the loss of “big booty latinas,” the operative words are clearly “big booty.” It’d only be slightly less gross if they said “big booty women.”

The patriarchal belief that many people have is “all else equal, attractive women have more value than unattractive women.”

Patriarchy encourages infinite debate on exactly how much value a women’s attractiveness has, and the common belief is that very attractive women are highly valued.

These pictures are only interesting to chuds because western media has systematically dehumanized folks the middle east so that our governments could attack them without public backlash.

They have been propagandized to believe that people in the middle east have no value, and these pictures challenge that.

Ultimately, these pictures are weaponizing patriarchy against imperialism. “Oh my god, I didn’t realize we were bombing something of value” is a realization that more folks needs to have, but it’s really icky that this was an effective way to do it.

I choose to believe the OP made an intentional decision to do that, and the fact that it caught on means that it worked.

If the goal is that more folks see people in the middle east as humans with value, I’ll excuse leveraging people’s existing shitty beliefs to do so.

The ends justify the means, but the means justify a shower.

Are you saying that they should have done community policing without the protests? I.e. the protests drew additional attention from the state that community policing on it’s own wouldn’t have?

That’s a great point. A protest calls attention to the organization (by design), and when that’s done by an organization that also takes militant anti-state action, it’s a recipe for crackdown.

My analysis after this discussion is that militant action is a necessary component of a resistance movement, but that mutual aid networks build real power outside capitalism. Our strategy needs to consider how to react when crackdowns inevitably occur, with an understanding that direct opposition is impossible because of the institutional power in the imperial core.

I’ll probably make a separate post about that, but if you have thoughts or know of any existing theory in that realm I’d be interested in learning!

Fair, Luigi is a shining example of violence winning public support

Right, I mostly mean ideological suppression.

What nonviolent mutual aid that was promoted by the state are you thinking of? I can’t think of anything that’s part of the capitalist narrative, but I could be missing something.

I am actively involved, and I’m afraid. We should all be afraid. I do not want what happened to the black liberation movement to happen to us, and I’m trying to think of ways to avoid that.

If dude lives to be 150, that absolutely advances science!

No, we won’t know which of his wacky hijinks did it, but we will learn that it is possible and that some combination of the stuff he did actually works.

The science would then be mechanical: try different combinations of his experiments, and see what makes people’s lives longer.

He’s got an experiment population of exactly one. The only way for his one lifespan to be relevant to science is if it is a historic outlier.

I don’t think it’s important to delve into the origin story of the hypothetical, since I’m mostly curious about how the state and capitalist superstructures would have been likely to react.

But if it’s important to you: MLK was promoting nonviolence during the liberation movement. In the hypothetical, let’s say he was able to convince the entire movement commit to nonviolence.

That’s fair, I’m unfamiliar with the programs of all of the different orgs and tbh I thought it was all under the BPP umbrella.

Based on the fact that there was such a widespread crackdown, I think it’s safe to say that the entire movement was targeted (rather than a specific organization).

I think my original question was too narrow vs what I intended, which was basically: what if the entire movement didn’t have militant elements? What if they had done nonviolent mutual aid only?

In a similar vein:

• Why is the popular narrative around MLK reduced to protests, speeches, and an unwavering commitment to nonviolence?
• Why do we only learn about Rosa Parks, and not the years-long bus boycott that was accomplished by people working together?
• Why we told about Henry Ford giving Saturdays off, but not how unions won the 40 hour work week?

We know that capital will not tell us how to overthrow it, but I’m only now starting to see how it limits our imagination.

The oppressed cannot fight an oppressor they do not understand, so capitalism must never be the oppressor.

You cannot effectively fight capitalism if you never conceive of the right weapons, so effective weapons must not be talked about.

Understanding that, our job as revolutionaries gets way easier, because we CAN coax capital to tell us how to overthrow it - we just do the stuff that it suppresses and don’t do stuff that it promotes.

The capitalist narrative around the black panthers is that they were overtly militant, so we should take that as a strong signal that our movement should NOT be overtly militant. The nonviolent mutual aid was suppressed, which is a strong signal we SHOULD do nonviolent mutual aid.