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Gonzaloism is a cult. One massive cult which destroys everything it touches and harms the people who are sucked under by it.

For the past few months, I was a part of this cult. I basically worshiped "Chairman Gonzalo", upheld him as a superhuman figure and "Great Leader" to the world communist movement. I was utterly fanatical. We all were.

We isolated ourselves from other communists. Even other Maoists whom we met we called "rightists" if they failed to adhere to the rigid set of dogmas that composes Gonzaloism. To us, you were either a "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist, with the contributions of universal validity of Chairman Gonzalo" ("M-L-M, pM, CUVCG", note that you had to include the dashes even in the acronym, otherwise you were denying Maoism "scientific continuation".), or you were nothing.

My website was made to reflect the point of view of this cult. Every article had to pay homage to Gonzaloism in some form. Whenever mentioning Marxism, you always had to append it with "(today Maoism)" or else you were suspected of being part of the out-group.

We basically worshiped a group called "The Worker", which is tied with the "Committee to Reconstitute the CPUSA". The cult-like tendencies of this clique is detailed here. Every article from them had to be reflected in our project in some way. I kept regular email correspondence with them and held them in high regard, but never allowed to be an editor. This is one of the features of a cult; you are never good enough, always be servile to your betters.

Suddenly, Trump was not a fascist, because "The Worker" said so (they failed to comply with Gonzalo's narrow definition of fascism). Suddenly, the Black nation did not exist. And so on, and so forth. Supporters (potentially members; they kept their associations hidden) of "The Worker" joined our Discord server and propagated their views. There was an entire gang of "thought leaders" who could recite "The Worker" articles and quotations from Chairman Gonzalo in seconds, and their line was presented as an unfalsifiable truth.

This continued for a long time. Eventually, two of my best friends had a talk with me and told me their thoughts; I was in a cult.

At first, it was hard to believe them, but I eventually realized there was truth to what they said. They showed me a list of features of a cult and my group was increasingly meeting many of them.

I spoke with a Marxist-Leninist about this from a respected party of mine. He confirmed my suspicions but, even despite my Gonzaloism, offered me a path towards true proletarian organizing.

I decided — this had to stop. I started questioning Gonzaloism, even in small ways, but was immediately called a "rightist" and "dogmato-revisionist" by the Gonzaloites. The non-Maoists in the server noted their cult-like tendencies, their appeals to authority, etc. but they to were called revisionists and thus placed in the out-group.

I had enough of Gonzaloism. I purged the cultists and deleted my website.

From now on, I will commit to true proletarian organizing.

I know you’re out there web devs. Explain to me how it is the Larian launcher is so slow? How does it chug displaying a few images and a run game with vulkan button? The bethesda launcher much the same chugs for no reason at all. Epic, steam, uplay, ea its all the same web client that eats monumental resources but somehow even more than normal.

Valve is not innocent of this depending on the device Ive had issues where big picture mode absolutely crippled my gpu for reasons completely unknown.

How are they all like this? Are the js frameworks really just that heavy now? I miss when steam had native components rip good things i guess. Some of the older web client programs never felt this bad, slack and discord were alright but now everything seems to be competing with Teams for most bloated clunky crap user experience ever.

I have no fucking way of getting any of it back.

I'm just completely fucking FUCKED.

alt text : a blacked out silhouette of a side profile with the negative space of multiple jagged teeth curling inwards towards their head, flora in the corner.

its so hard to hang out when you're being constantly bombarded by the anxiety that romantic nonplatonic feelings might arise in the other person. Keeping your interactions sanitized so that you don't accidentally lead anyone on, but at this point simply showing anyone any form of attention is "leading them on."

I love everyone, I want to be friends with everyone, I want to invite them to my home and watch movies and share meals together. Why must this indicate romance in the sense that this escalator ends in sex?

rhetorically, why is sex and romance such a big deal anyways? Both seekers and avoiders place an importance upon it that seems excessive. Its simply a thing that happens when your lives are compadable enough.

In the end I feel objectified more than ever, just a vehicle for people's sexual and romantic desires. Not seen as a real person who views their own life as romantic, and the meeting of people as romantic (but not in the nonplatonic sense.)

this message has been brought to you by the (demi) aroace collective.

Ynow I wouldn’t mind if anything i did made even the slightest sense. Like there’s no work to do because there isnt any work. Businesses are just like circle jerking bullshit on all levels while 1 goblin in the basement is keeping everything ticking over so the rest of us can play political battles and kiss ass while doing nothing of value.

Like they’re talking about ai automating jobs but there was no job to automate because we dont do anything.

I keep thinking about the black books sketch of working in the office. Nobody knows whats actually going on or what their job even is you just carve out some niche, get a few consumers of it and thats where you sit in the little piss bucket you have made for yourself knowing deep down it doesnt really benefit anybody.

Just need to mentally check out until i get fired i guess. Use my office hours to make a game the thing i actually want to do.

I am doing some study like a good Marxist. Currently I'm working hard at my job by listening through What is to be done by Lenin. I'm maybe 40% through...

And I am annoyed. People told me it would be a "banger" and instead it is very tedious criticism against "economism", retellings of some events that happened in the 1890s, and a lot of talk of some Bugotti dude who Lenin doesn't like. OK, so I get it, you think people pushing for economic reforms aren't doing enough. Why is this taking so many pages to explain such a point? And when do I get to the "what is to be done" part?

I swear so much theory I try to get through is exactly like this. I have enough exposure to soldier through it, but there's no way in hell I can give this to a radicalizing lib or anyone on that path and have them engage with it. It's a bad fit for my org's reading series because the people in this org still have lib brainworks to work out. This isn't going to be persuasive if it's hard to read in the first place.

So what's more "friendly" theory that can be more appropriate? Or if there summaries of these works in more pedestrian language I'm down for that. It's just so frustrating as someone who thinks I know some things to encounter these texts. The right doesn't propagandize like this! Why can't our propaganda be more like theirs since their propaganda works so well?

Skim through this when you get a chance: https://freelibrary.overdrive.com/media/4876007

Yes, it's right wing slop, but notice how it is laid out, how it is colorful, there's little comics and bits. It's a book that is accessible and looks appealing to read! It just happens to be capitalist apologia. I want a version of this but for our side.

In the first one I was a high school student, our class was at my hometown's train station. A classmate told Pam Bondi to fuck off, she was about to tell security to arrest him, and I had found the guts to also throw insults at her and start a chant. The whole class joined in and we ran after her, chasing her out of town, then barricading the streets to the station against the police after dark. Idk why she was there, I live in the Netherlands.

My mom initially liked Bondi but only knew her from inoffensive things outside politics, she reacted shocked to me telling what I did, but when I told her that she was the head of ICE (she was so in the dream) and behind the deportations she went: "Oh, damn..." Unfortunately IRL she likes far-right girlbosses like Alice Weidel and regurgitates anti-immigrant, "law and order" rhetoric despite being a post-Soviet immigrant herself.

In the second dream I was at a conference of various Western ghouls, presidents and prime ministers, which I felt was inspired by the photo in this post. The first one was a eurofederalist and unveiled a flag for it which was the outline of Greece and western Turkey in the EU flag colours (like in the thumbnail). Luxembourg proposed a flag that was just theirs with random patterns added, the Dutch proposed the orange-white-blue former flag of the Dutch Republic which is now a symbol of Dutch white nationalists, similarly to Australia's old "Eureka Flag".

An American woman proposed a new writing system which was just a random cipher a kid would have come up with, with some vowel/consonant combos given their own symbols that approximated the heads of cats and cows. And it's specifically for writing in tax forms.

The Pope was introduced as the "Lucifer King". I told someone that "Lucifer" has multiple meanings not all related to the Devil and that I found it confusing, to which I added: "Ironic, because the Devil is who speaks in riddles." I was in a different train station in that moment, it looked a bit like the image below: bare-bones platforms, thin, open metal arched roof, but it also had nice mosaics in the arches. Like it was frozen in the early Industrial Revolution without modern renovations.

The planet burning text summarisers seem to have found their main purpose as confirmation bias machines and I am finding myself arguing with the output of an LLM when talking to people.

Now after many years in the world of office jobs my general perception of most people is

• severe inability to be wrong
• severe inability to do anything about being wrong
• egos so weak they could shatter just by looking at them
• huffing your own farts and doubling down is the name of the game

And so I have to contend with this. People who cannot accept they have made a mistake arguing with me via an llm output they managed to wrestle into agreeing with them because they can’t accept fault. The amount of time i have given learned educated provably correct advice only to hear “but copilot told me this” and the output being some hallucinated drivel cos the person who wrote the prompt is more bothered by trying to be correct than resolving the original issue they were having.

I know a small handful of people who have gone completely off the rails already getting chatgpt to confirm basically any delusion they have and then when i see them will go on about it for hours on end how they broke out of the matrix and see the world for what it is and that we don’t need schools anymore just give everyone an llm.

All it reminds me of is the “do your own research” crowd of mumsnet nazis parroting some random facebook post on how being vegan gives you autism and the only cure is shooting your child in the head. Except its worse because the llm can keep that delusion going for longer and build on it until most people are living in some ai generated dreamland of pure unfiltered confirmation bias.

I think we’re going to hit some major problems not long from now as a significant portion of people start offloading their thinking to these corporate models. I already see a decent chunk just accepting it as an unbiased authority and its scary. A completely new and arguably more effective way to deliver even more extreme propaganda if they chose to do so and very few people even question it.

Oh and the number of people unknowingly sharing sora videos is…. Dire

To add to this I never really understood why a lot of people have a hard time being wrong and have such diabolically weak egos. Like it’s logically infeasible to not be wrong and if you are wrong just idk learn from it? I like being wrong cos it means i can fix it and not be wrong later. The only reasonable response to being incorrect is “oops” followed by “thanks”

thanks in advance

Several weeks ago I made a thread that talked about starting a website to provide a central place to teach leftists how to buy a gun and use it safely. leftgunguide.com was available and long story short, now there's a Wiki with some links and the start of a guide online.

What I would love help with:

• Any images that would be good here. Memes, infographics, explainers, etc. Maybe image versions of famous pro-gun quotes from folks on the left.

• More content on specific topics. When I did some research I found a good amount of general guides. Are there specific topics that should be added?

• Style updates/layout updates for the site itself? I believe the wiki CSS can be updated.

Once the site looks good and is fleshed out I'll get the domain wired up and start spreading the link around.

It feels like the entire internet is getting sanitized for advertisers and corpos. Where's someone who's into kinks supposed to get freaky anonymously for fun?

Holy shit what a waste of a Saturday night. I can't believe I gave that yayhoo money.

Jokes on me though. I watched it.

1. Are you red and in your shed?

2. Are you green and in the machine?

3. Are you yellow and ready to mellow?

4. Are you brown and on the ground?

And, last but not least,

5. Are you blue and wanting to sniff glue?

This job I applied for had a little chat widget in the corner of the page called "job bot" that offered "AI application assistance". I feel like I can use all the help I could get so I clicked it. It asked for my name and email address, then provided a link to the page I was already on.

Bonus points: It was for an environmental conservation position

No I will not welcome our new AI overlords.

I got dmed by someone I made a project with a few year back asking them to play-test this game their friend made and after I downloaded it they were able to change my login info (cause despite how long I had it and how frequently I used it, I never set up 2FA). Anyway, I'm pretty sure Discord blocked my email address so I had to open a ticket on another email account. Honestly, I hope I can get my account back because as well as it being one of the oldest accounts I have I know Discord is rolling out some "ID Verification" bullshit next month and older accounts are less likely to be affected. Plus that's how I stay in contact with a lot of friends. I befriended this person on Discord who's also ace like I am and I bet they're really confused why I just ghosted them.

Damn I thought it was a done deal, I even had chats with the folks at the research institute who would've offered the funding, and they were very optimistic. I was pretty much already expecting the next 4 years of my life to be done doing that.

Feeling kind of neutral about it tho. Maybe emotions will come later.

And this is the university where I am friends with a tenured professor, who was also pushing my application forward. If I apply to other places i'm certainly not gonna have that for any other applications. I don't even know what other programs to apply to.

Last year I sent a complaint to my local MP about the fact that the NHS doesn’t fund shockwave therapy, a physiotherapy treatment I needed to help me walk again (I was helped to pay for some sessions by the people here). In my email I mostly wrote about my physical difficulties and how it was impacting my life being barely able to walk, but I also made a brief mention that it adversely affects my mental health to have to live like this. I said the NHS should fund this treatment and also spoke about how there would be fewer people languishing on disability benefits if we could receive the treatment we need on the NHS.

All this time later I have finally got a response from the “Correspondence Officer” at the “Ministerial Correspondence and Public Enquiries Department of Health and Social Care,” doesn’t even give their actual name.

It’s an absolutely infuriating response that ignores all my physical difficulties and the impact it has on my life, ignores my comments about people left to languish on disability due to lack of NHS treatment and just tells me to ask my GP to refer me for mental health treatment if I’m having difficulty coping wit my life situation!

What a shower of absolutely useless bastards this government are.

I made a post asking what the key differences between Hexbear and Lemmygrad were, a question I already asked in the Matrix chat, and everyone there gave rude responses and acted as though I was trolling when I was just honestly curious as I never took the time to really engage with Hexbear before. It almost made me cry.

I have problems with my internet use. Every hour, sometimes half-hour, I check back into Hexbear. I suffer from severe OCD in combination with other mental illnesses; I can't help it. I just want somewhere to be welcome without being treated like a rapine beast for a past which I can't alter.

I am not here to cause drama or troll. I have deliberately avoided political arguments to avoid harming the community's flow. Yes, I have done foolish things in the past when I was 15, but have not we all?

I came here under the pseudonym I am most commonly remembered by as a peace gesture to a community which I have disrespected to indicate that I would not hide who I am and I was being honest for once, and I hope people would respect me too.

Is this too much to ask?

There was a new email sent to tmz demanding ONE bitcoin in exchange for info that will lead to the person who did it. Now this is funny because 1 btc is about equal to how much the FBI is offering for info (like 60 grand). Last night, a stumped CNN anchor asked WHY a person would want the money upfront for info, and the other guy said (paraphrasing) "the authorities don't have a good track record of paying out rewards to good samaritans". They then went on to talk about the narc who ratted out Luigi and didn't get the reward money.

Just thought it was funny they'd even bother to mention that and do an actual analysis of how horrible the feds are and why someone would want to game the system.

I don't have The Everything App or Telegram, or even a YouTube account. I think I can get to The Everything App via XCancel though, unless you need to sign in. YouTube always asks me to sign in, but then I can't make an account without giving my phone number (and who knows what else they will ask for later and then almost immediately proceed to leak or "get hacked" aka we didn't put a lock on the door and someone came in).

It sucks that everything is so centralized and controlled now.

Like yeah its ideology was poorly articulated and delivered condescendingly and cringe and often cynical or opportunistic and just as often the work of teenagers, but it was also one of the first big online communities I can recall to take a consistent and uncompromising stance against at the time near-universally normalized forms of bigotry like ableism, fatphobia, and transphobia.

That's not to trivialize the very real and foundational work of all those who came before, but for many people, myself included, it was my very first significant exposure to any of these ideas. I feel like all the best modern online leftist spaces take the same basic stance against those bigotries but from a much more mature, systemic, and materially grounded angle.

Due to my medical issues I haven't had a good nights sleep in years, and my dreams stopped, at least I don't remember having dreams in several years as I barely sleep at all. But a couple of nights ago I actually managed to sleep through for like 2 hours and had a dream.

I dreamt that I had married into the Swedish royal family. Except the Swedish royals were the Skarsgard acting family, Stellan Skarsgard was the King of Sweden, and his sons Alexander, Bill, Gustaf etc were the Princes. I assume I was married to one of the Princes but the dream never made it clear which one. We were all out in public on our royal duties, walking through the city waving at crowds. Then I had a flashback to my wedding. I remembered that I had expected to wear a veil and be walked down the aisle by a male relative but the Skarsgards told me, "no, we don't do that in Sweden because it's sexist."

That was basically it. My only dream in years, kind of random and trying to work out what it means. I used to really want to live in Sweden when I was young but that didn't work out.