Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Today is the Truth and Reconciliation in Canada in recognition that the children from Native American, Inuit, and Metis groups were imprisoned in the series of slave camps, human experimental camps, and death camps under the pretense of “Indian Residential Schools” and fake cultural assimilation since the 1850s. Although the European settlers claimed that the fake schools ended in 1997, there are evidence that the fake school death camps continued in secret after that time.
For the Truth and Reconciliation, the European settlers’ government in Canada confessed that there were some vague child abuses and cultural genocide. However, they refused to confess that the fake schools are slave camps and death camps in disguise. They continue to deny that the Nazi Holocaust were inspired by the Indian Residential fake Schools from the British diaspora or that the fake schools provide free child labor, free stolen inheritance from the extortion of money from Indigenous parents, and demonic blessing from child sacrifices to demons. The free riding over Indigenous groups from the fake schools ensure victory against the hard working innovative scary red Soviets who gain the permission from the invisible hand to manage lazy Capitalists in Pax Americana. However, the cost of free riding over Native Americans, Inuits, and Metis is the current need to import enormous number of immigrants of Non-European origin to compensate for the declining number of Indigenous babysitters.
In fact, they continued to frame the First Nation people for the savage teaching from the Indian Residential fake Schools, the ongoing sabotage of reparation, planned imprisonment in harsh barren wasteland until the Indigenous people forfeit the reparation, planned starvation, planned chemical attacks, and planned assault by white rapists. The then Conservative Party of Canada, Stephen Harper, recognize that he could no longer hide all the free riding, savagery, and hypocrisy in the fake schools. To provide lip service, Stephen Harper open the Truth and Reconciliation speech where he confessed to the unrefutable cultural genocide to gain creditability to hide the more severe war crimes in the fake schools. He also boosted that the savage teaching in the fake schools is so strong that some fake school survivors cannot adjust to the civilized life of their parents and are demanding a return to savagery and cannibalism in the fake schools.
Yeah, I remember Stephen Harper, though I have to say that Mark Carney is just as bad; he’s a conservative masquerading as a liberal (so basically twice the liberalism, double the fall, as Count Dooku said in Star Wars… pretty sure Count Dooku said that, dammit, don’t @ me!).
Best political songs playable solo on paino?
The Internationale and the Workers’ Marseillaise cone to mind. Also if your country has a tradition with social-political songs I advise you to look there.
I am aware of the internationale. I’m collecting others. Till now I wrote down the Worker’s Marseillaise and March of the Enthusiasts from recommendations. The only communist party I’m aware of in Lebanon is the LCP and it hasn’t done anything since the civil war, so it’s not really something to honor
This guy plays march of enthusiasts solo so I guess march of enthusiasts is one you could play. Or you could go with the classic the internationale.
how’s everyone? it’s chuseok here
Merry chuseok! (I didn’t know what that was until just now but harvest festivals are the best festivals)
thanks a ton. it’s nice out here
I have the opportunity to get therapy and it has now led to some heavy introspection to think about how I got to this point. I had to take the day off today because of this. On the one hand it is good to finally get therapy, on the other hand it is tiring.
I’m also feeling let down with party work as basically nothing of value is coming forward. Just a meeting now and then, no real activist or other organising stuff. I’d love for us to start leading by example and set up some direct action stuff in the city but I’ve already said this a few times without getting a real response.
I spend the weekend in my hometown and that means, for me, spending time in the middle of a blue collar, working class community. I have trouble linking the people that join our party with the typical working class people I grew up with. Or at least the side of the party I am active in. Mostly educated, straight out of college leftist type of people. Which is not wrong per se, but I feel like we are starting to get that type of person tunnel vision, you know? I personally never gratuated college and through blue collar work managed to get where I am now and sometimes our party group feels like losing track with what keeps the working class busy. My dad, working a blue collar job for 30+ years now, does not see the need to sign the umpteenth petition for example. And neither do I feel the need to ask people to sign the umpteenth petition if I had to be honest. We need to do more.
Just a rant and I’ll probably figure things out but if you can’t reach the working class en masse after more than two decades of right wing policies I feel like you are doing things wrong.
And also, with trust in political parties at an all time low it seems, how much credibility do you think to build up when to them, you seem like just another party asking for votes?
Get out there and show how organising can bring change. Turn that ugly run down piece of land in your neighborhood into a park. Hell, maybe squat an empty building but without the anarchist pissing against the wall tactic. Do something.
I don’t know where you live, but where I do, many usually uneducated workers, peasants, and petty bourgeois think it’s normal to throw rubbish everywhere. Even educated peoples, which are usually well-off seem to have the same problem, so while building and planning such projects, which in my case is a communal garden, take it as an opportunity to make such basic concepts normalized and encourage more community building along side political agitation. In my experience, the youth are usually the most prone to radicalization, so focus on planting seeds there.
huh, didn’t realize there were still so many electoralist holdouts on hexbear until the last half year or so. not making a judgment one way or another or trying to feed internet drama, just an observation. it had seemed for a while that the space had turned pretty firmly against that theory of change post-Bernie.
They rear their head every time a new AOC/Bernie comes out and then dog pile everyone else, chasing off the more radical and especially anti-imperialist members of that instance (curious). I think the refusal to have a burning zionist flag emoji did cause a lot of non-white users to leave.
I think the refusal to have a burning zionist flag emoji did cause a lot of non-white users to leave.
okay I know I wanted to not stoke internet drama (and this is mostly separate from electoralism stuff) but I will say: that struggle session and the big one late last year really showcased the core issues with the site IMO. culture of administration has always had an undercurrent of bogus Poster’s Vanguardism, but admins seem to have radlib politics with chauvinist tendencies (in a majority ML instance, so a user base that’s broadly more politically developed than its leadership) and the site has no real democratic input. these contradictions came to a head at various points in the last year, after a year or two of peace & relatively chill vibes.
that’s not to mention the impression many have of contempt for the userbase from site management, or the impression that you can get away with a lot of hostility (or tbh outright bullying) if management likes you enough and/or you have enough clout, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Sadly thats all too common in irl local chapters/ organized groups as well. I know too many cases where essentially a unofficial clique of friends pick out a pet-issue or cover for someone with reactionary views (or even like being a creep towards female comrades) and then push out any who make a fuss. Of course they will provide a splurge of socialist worded nonsense to justify it.
It gets on my nerves seeing it online replayed.
I knew of a few popular users that have dipped because of the surge of radlibs. One’s gripe was specifically about users dunking on Sakai. Other than that, there is a surge of combative users too. Purpleworm is one to take a look at. I’ve never seen someone lose their fucking shit over a meme like that, lmao.
Where so?
just a lot more DSA posting since Zohran, a few users over there are active members.
Some were very involved in his campaign and do try to recruit on there.
Honestly, I don’t mind comrades joining the DSA just because it’s a great salt tactic. I’ve personally had a few lib-adjacents I’ve pulled away from the DSA. I just think it’s a fool’s errand to expect anything to ever come of it other than a radicalizing pool.
Funny thing is that they don’t really mind at all. The issue lies with the domination aspect of some pro-electoral people that essentially demand complete subjugation to their view and see whoever is currently the left celeb du jour as the hail mary for change.
Agreed.
Aaaaah, I’ve seen that. I thought you were talking about main-stream electoral stuff and I was gonna get whiplash that it was starting up this early. Yeah, for as much as that is worth, that really shit the bed when Zionist Mamdani started spitting Israeli propaganda on TV.
Pretty sure there has been an organized operation to make hexbear less revolutionary that has been gaining significant traction over the last year. By this time next year it’ll be a blahaj.zone clone with a better take on the ukraine war.
do you mean by state actors? i feel like hexbear is too low impact for that personally. (letting disgruntled people who use the site in bad faith into positions of power, that i do think has happened.)
tbh i think it’s mostly underlying contradictions and negative tendencies in the site culture/administration that have always been there, but came to a head in the last year or so. admins have always seen themselves as Vanguard of Posts (rather than what they should be, which is peacekeepers of a chill, cozy community whose focus and culture should be directed by the users). my impression is that that undercurrent kind of erupted after a year or two of relative peace & chill vibes.
A year ago during the “unaccountable and inconsistent moderation” Struggle sessions I was willing to think it was just a random mistake that put the wrong people into power. But those struggles were never resolved and they just kept banning people and addressing “issues” that were not the real problem.
Now here we are where trashing China and staning for a democratic party NYC mayoral candidate are the norm.
If anything the Vanguard of Posters have been ejected from power and the “chill vibes” crypto-liberals are running the place.
Less that, I’ve been more wary of their takes on China and recent color revolutions springing up around the world. Electoralism non-sense does feel like a warning sign all things considered, though.
I’ve also seen a massive uptick in ‘irony-posting’ (I don’t have a name for it) reminiscent to what I’ve seen on
spoiler
c/doomer [not linked]
Are the protests in Morocco legit? Or a color revolution?
porque no los dos? Its safe to assume that every protest movement has infiltrators and collaborators. Color revolutions are not created out of nothing. They exploit real grievances and unrest and then attempt to capitalize on the resulting chaos.
The question is, “Does Morocco have a communist party involved in the protest who are prepared to take power if the government falls?”
Man I discovered working while standing and my productivity shot up.
Whenever I sit down I have trouble formulating my thoughts but if I go for a walk it just starts streaming. Wonder if being neurotypical has anything to do with it.
Standing in general is just better for you anyway.
You are using this? 👀
I hope you’re getting paid by production. Otherwise you need to find some good ways to slack off while standing.
I took my new medication Trintellix (a new antidepressant for MDD or major depressive disorder) about 3 or 4 hours ago.
It doesn’t have a Generic yet; just Brand, as of the current year.
So far, I don’t know how I should be feeling, but I don’t think I feel bad.
From what I understand so far, this is an experimental and new drug.
I’m realizing one of the fundamental problems with the field of mental health and therapy is the contradictory nature of knowing a person vs. not knowing. A therapist is supposed to have a certain level of professional detachment. But this also means they are unable to be in your corner the way a close friend would, preventing them from providing similar benefits. A therapist also just has a very limited scope of knowledge about you. Most of their information on you is based on the assumption that you’re a reliable narrator about yourself and your life, which may not be the case. I imagine there’s probably some training to look for signs of being an unreliable narrator, but overall, it’s not like they can just go check with other people you know to see if your stories are straight.
But even if everything you present is accurate, even if they read between the lines and learn tics you have, all they are seeing is “therapy you” during a very limited time frame. They don’t see how you are with friends, family, when you’re out and about, etc.
In short, they don’t really know you and if they did really know you, it would be hard for them to do their job in a professionally detached way. But without knowing you, most of what they can prescribe is generic advice. And that works some of the time. Like deep breathing techniques for anxiety, sure, that applies to a lot of people. But it’s also advice you can find with a web search. I think there is something valuable in basic back and forth with a professional, but beyond that, I’m not sure it does much and it might make things worse if the therapist is professionally compelled to get you to “change”. They can frame it as wanting to help you change in the ways that you want to change, but underneath that is the professional compulsion to show improvements relating to a standardized mental health designation of chronic issues.
I suspect a lot of people these days just need someone to talk to and that’s part of why turning to an LLM as “therapy” is enough for them. Because for them, they don’t really need the limited effectiveness therapy process in the first place. They just need something like the distance of talking to a therapist without feeling like they’re being pushed in a certain direction. I mean, isn’t it a bit weird that even in romantic relationships, the common refrain is you shouldn’t get into a partnership expecting to change someone, but in therapy, it’s basically the opposite; the expectation is that you come out different somehow. But if a romantic partner, a person who you’d expect to know you better than almost anyone, is not supposed to be someone who changes you, what qualifies a single individual who doesn’t know you from very limited conversation sessions to help you change?
P.S. Did not realize this would come out so long. Thought about doing it as a post in freechat, but don’t want it to come across as a broader anti-mental-health-field message. I have nothing against the intention of the field as a whole. Just have problems with it in practice and the logistical limitations of it.
All I know is that CBT is useless for Autistic people, at the very least.
DBT, EMDR, and/or somatic therapy might be more worthwhile.
If your therapist repeats at you CBT and you’re neurodivergent or Autistic, it might not be worth it.
Also, beware of therapy abuse.
I got the party overviews for the upcoming elections in The Netherlands today as I am living in another country and need it up front. One of the participating parties is NL Plan which is set up as some sort of meme thing by a Chinese dude and it might unironically be the most leftist thing out there.
Free public transport, in favor of building affordable housing, pro migration, pro public healthcare, etc. But it’s a joke of a party of course. The dude is pro China though lol.
Interesting.
Feeling surprisingly good in spite of myself.
Soon everything that was lost will soon come back. Not in the form it was before but in a stronger and brighter version.
Socialism is inevitable if we all fight from our respective place. A better world is possible.
i must organize in order to live. life without a political purpose or motivation is to accept the suffering of millions. i love organizing with all my heart!
I’m trying to find an org to join.
Lemme know if you have any advice.
i got introduced to my org through my friends. i think if you have any friends that are already organizing, go with them. i did this and found out that the deepest of all friendships is comradeship.
if you don’t, however, i would make the decision based on three things:
- are they ML
- do they do/want to do mass work
- are they intense about political education
if yes, join. all the smaller ideological squabbles you can ignore. if there’s no org like that around you, start one! black panthers started with six members.
Yeah, I might try to start a collective, but that’s beyond me right now, due to extenuating circumstances outside my control.
if you want to talk more you can shoot me a dm! the most important thing is committing.
Yeah, I’m not sure what to commit to yet, but I will consider that, thank you!
Protests in Peru
Reinstate Castillo already.
The coup was a rightwing putsch.
Hope everyone has a pleasant week, sticks with their goals and plans, and takes care of themselves.
Communism will win.
