I honestly can't handle being around them, they love pretending to be more reasonable than they are, making me look like an emotional ass (thanks neurodivergence). Seriously, what's up with chuds dancing around the point and never being honest about their intentions? Like they pretend they don't want to exterminate muslims, or people from countries they don't like, why all the dishonesty? I know she believes these things because they like watching Ben Shapiro, Assmongold, Matt Walsh etc. She's joined Orthodox church after finding Catholics too woke for upholding hasic COVID restrictions, and constantly whines about Muslims.

I'm more than happy to admit I want society to be violent towards billionaires, fascists etc. Why can't they be honest about it, why dance around the point?

Water you doing today? I just got off work and haven't been able to post all day. So here I am. Let the shitposting begin.

Hey comrades. I've got a chronic condition the system failed to catch. I don't blame the overworked medics; I blame the politicians who sold my country for a buck and treat us like cogs in a machine, and the system that allows the satanic pedophile elites to exist. My cope? Turning that rage into content creation. Not because it's easy (the stats haunt me), but because I'm here and I'm spiteful.

My goals are modest but radical:

• A living wage.
• Hire someone to help me with the things I don't care much about, like making video thumbnails.
• Use the platform to build a decentralized organizing tool, not just another Discord. Think a mesh network for pure mutual aid & direct action, free from party lines and doxxing. Hopefully a way to connect the different leftist parties of each country so that it feels like you're participating in a universal movement.

What I need from you:

• Tips for making it without selling my soul.
• Best resources to learn video editing, SEO, and promotion.
• Harsh truths, delivered gently. I know the odds are trash, but so is the healthcare system, and I'm still here.

Upvote so a comrade can afford to exist. ✊

Trying to run a DND campaign for the first time but I don't know anything about map making, geography, or geology. I want the physical features of the land to mostly make sense from a geological perspective and then conform the borders of my city-states and empire to their natural geographic constraints. How do I even begin with this?

I was walking back around a corner from a water meter and saw an orange stray semi-running up to me and screaming. He was a sweet cat, followed me for a few minutes, making figure eights around my legs and stopping to holler at me occasionally.

I petted him because he was a good kitty, and went on my way. I got home an hour later and while my cat was greeting me at the door she stopped to sniff the palm of my hand I used to pet the orange boi. She growled a tiny bit, put her ears back and kept sniffing my hands. She walked to the couch, jumped on it and hissed at me.

I thoroughly expect to find a cat poop in my shoes tomorrow.

At the very least to describe what the various communities are for. There seem to be many "general-purpose" communities and I do not understand the difference between them, and there are also communities that seem to be duplicates of one another, namely /c/hexbear, /c/den, and /c/feedback.

Additionally, I believe having a wiki blurb for common "emoji" would be beneficial. Who is the person in the image? What is their politics? Why is their image immortalized on our platform? What are some of the common usages of the emoji in terms of communicating a message or emotion through shorthand? Often I am faced with comments that I find incomprehensible due to the use of an emoji that I do not understand.

at least my InstaSlop account is fine

Don't even know why, probably told too many transphobes to off themselves

Did they really think that making the least charismatic man alive the face of their product would endear the public to it?

Sick and twisted fate

Local area has received a boatload of rain recently, and wet weather seems to generally be sticking around, for once.

One month ago, we were at 8% capacity. Today, lake level is one-tenth shy of 23%. Some folks are here talking about watering lawns, and watering cars again. 'Back to normal', they say.

Man's hubris knows no bounds. Round them up and [removed] them.

btw is it just me, or are there less and less people on this website, all i see around me are familiar faces

My dad worked as an engineer (ironically, or perhaps because of this, later as a safety engineer) and when he left university he got a job in Zambia for a short while (we are from the UK). He has many horror stories about how insanely racist the colonials were. I don't remember exactly what I said, but he told me two stories of how buisnesses handled pollution. He said when he worked in Avonmouth (near Bristol) what they did was kept strictly to regulations for emissions of N2O during the day and then at night when it was dark and it couldn't be seen release as much as they like (to the point locals knew not to put washing on the line at night since it would dissolve).

The other one was the lead smelter in Zambia. He told me the colonials intentionally put the black township downwind of the smelter and the white homes upwind. He said expats who came to Zambia would always be shocked but the colonials were in his words "soulless inhuman husks".

While working there he got bullied for refusing to be tolerant of the extreme racist attitudes and so they arranged for him to have an accident which led to him getting molten lead spilled on him. He has a very large scar on his lower back, I loved the texture of it as a kid, I had no idea that was why he had it. He told me this story literally a few days ago.

I was so incensed by it I was like where was this, maybe we can make like a video where people talk about their experiences, its so horrible, so many people are tryna whitewash colonialism these days and these stories need telling...

It was Kabwe. I'd never heard of it. I look it up and there's multiple documentries about "the most toxic town in africa".

My dad ...was there... he was part of that...

A few years ago they tried to bring a class action lawsuit against Anglo American (the mining company) in South Africa because Zambia does not allow class action lawsuits. It was not allowed to be heard.

It drives me mad even to this day so many decades later no-one has managed to make anyone pay for what they did there.

I'm thinking the PD is off, but that's not supposed to be this bad if its off by 2mm. So now I need to send my glasses back to zenni to hopefully get a new pair in a month. It's bullshit. And for what? I don't even fucking need glasses. I'm near-sighted anyway. What, you want me to look at something over there? I'll just walk up to it, you fool. I have the power of locomotion, a gift that I don't take for granted, by the way. Why would I try to read text that's across the room? I can use a computer, I just need to sit a little closer. You know what? This glasses bullshit is a scam anyway. I paid 65 bucks and I'm still going to get screwed. I got the fancy filters on the lenses, I bet that's what did it. Too many filters, if I scraped them off I would be right as rain. You can see them in the light, a blue one and pink one. They gotta go. fuck glasses. Communism wouldn't allow this rent seeking from my eyes. Every year new pair, new bullshit to deal with. I already struggle to see with two (2!) other eye related disabilities, I should just get a braille keyboard and forget out sight. I don't need it. I don't need to see to smell flowers, hear a symphony, or fuck your mom. Sight is probably the most overrated sense in the world. You know what is the most underrated? Proprioception. You ever lose that? Because I have. In both of my hands. That was fucking hell. I would take being blinded any day of the week over going through that again. Eyes ain't shit. It's just hte bain forgetting it's place as the lump inside my skull. They are putting the eyes in scientific diagrams of the brain now, they have been elevated far above their station and I am taking a stand against them. Fuck eyes. Fuck glasses. Fuck opticians. Fuck Zenni. Fuck luxottica. I wrote this whole thing without glasses and you can't even tell because glasses are bullshit.

I'd give them a 9/10 texture and 6/10 flavor

Y'all got a favorite squash?

Seen a lot of posts illuding to sabotage of data centers but like, they are the last node in a chain of maintenance. We can do so much better with a simple utilities strike.

Not to discourage anyone though...

like for example i've noticed in my life that beginners luck is a real phenomenon and pops up constantly. i've just now thought of applying the dialectical method (or my own terminally online, meme-addled, haven't-read-enough-theory imitation of it) to be idea of beginners luck and skill mastery/learning in general

let's say beginners luck (playing well without understanding why your plays work) exists as a phenomenon due to the dialectical nature of the process by which humans acquire skills and its consequent non-linearity and unpredictability. mastering a game is the process of iteratively refining one's mental model of how best to play it, coming up with new strategies and tactics, testing them by playing the game, and keeping or rejecting reject strategies and tactics according to whether they succeed or fail.

this is pure thesis - antithesis - synthesis, right? like when you're totally new to a game you just try what seems natural (thesis). then you reach intermediate level by correcting for mistakes you made as a beginner (antithesis). then you jump to advanced mastery by recognizing which of your first round of corrections helped you and which were overcorrections, and for those overcorrections you revert back to (or at least toward) the way you were doing it when you first started (synthesis).

a good example is in chess. if the best move is one which breaks a common rule of thumb, a beginner might play it not knowing it breaks a rule; an intermediate player won't play it because they know it breaks the rule of thumb; and an expert will play it because they know this is an appropriate situation in which to break the rule of thumb.

are any of you aware of a book or paper about this dialectical understanding of learning? or am i just rambling nonsensically here?

I’m supposed to be doing important life logistics self care stuff but I saw a book in a used bookstore and decided not to get it and then I saw a video dunking on Sim Kern’s "tankies are calvinists” brainworms and now here I am thinking about the outsized role that speculative fiction has had upon the political landscape.  This is leading me down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts and idk if I’m cooking or if I am cooked (my AC can’t keep up so I’m at least partially cooked.  Heat maketh for odd thoughts) so I’d like some outside perspectives.  I don’t know where I’m going with this but if these disjointed ramblings inspire interesting related thoughts please, let’s chat.

Thread 1: Speculative fiction:

The book I considered picking up today was A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy, about an anarchist society that fights against colonizers and tries to defend themselves using asymmetrical warfare.  Sounds cool.  It’s short and I perhaps should have picked it up to read, but I ended up not, preferring to read other books (well tbh I’ve been mostly reading Red Sails essays of late).  I can predict that she has them win the fight and that it will be inspirational, given what passing familiarity I have had with her body of work previously — she focuses on uplifting stories, “cool people doing cool stuff”, hope! (¿though might one say “hopium”?).

This reminded me that I’d read Alien Clay by Adrian Czajkowski and while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t help but note that

Which sent a message, likely not what the author intended, that anarchist organizing doesn’t work without some big unreal maguffin to back it up.  But that wasn’t the point, the point was to show how it could work well and explore some cool xenobiology

Brave New World?  Speculative fiction.  1984?  Speculative fiction.  Lord of the Flies?  Fiction.  Fiction, fiction, fiction, ideas must be explored in fiction, and those explorations are as valid as explorations that are not in fiction but are in the realm of real analysis.

Thread 2:  Fleeing from the Horror of Reality into the Comfort of the Dream

Or, denying reality in favor of some hopeful message about how we can solve the unreal problems instead of doing the hard work to understand and grapple with the real problems

Liberals get upset with me for pointing out that the Democrats are genocidal Nazis and I think in some cases it’s because that makes them feel like the problem is too big to solve.  As long as the problem is just with Trump, the problem is solvable or endurable.  But if the problem is both wings of the AmeriKKKan Nazi Party, then it’s too insurmountable.  “Stop fascism in the Fourth Reich?  Better to hope that a pig will sprout wings!  Therefore I need Cuddlefish to be wrong so that I can have hope, therefore she must be wrong.”  Even though my message is not one of hopelessness, but a call to action, a naming of the problem so that the problem can be fought!  They cannot conceive of a way and so turn to fiction and nebulous dreams to comfort them.  Empty platitudes about community, about civil society and norms.  Or perhaps they are upset about the threat to their privileges, their class positions, and so turn to comforting fictions instead.  There are many reasons they turn their backs on reality, but they always do for whatever reason.  They have to, to preserve the fiction.

Anarchists have gotten upset with me for going “hell yeah dude, that sounds awesome!  Let’s look at these ideas of a better future more and delve into how that would work!  What are some historical examples, successes and failures?”  Or worse, when I asked questions about how to solve certain problems, I wasn’t even trying to poke holes in their utopian vision, I was trying to figure out how it would work, but somehow I was bourgeois for not being ok with letting people just die of cancer at age 30.  I’ve tried to really dig in, but their answers are so nebulous and involve a lot of “just-so” magical thinking.  It’ll work out somehow.  Hookworm isn’t real.  We will be greeted as liberators rather than as those bastards who destroyed the systems upon which people rely for survival.  Every small community will figure things out through cooperation so we don’t need to think about what comes next.  Source?  Trust me bro.  Read some poetry.  The dream is beautiful.

The dream is beautiful.  It is, and it’s a dream.  They’re all dreams.  But I try to work in the realm of reality, and reality is a nightmare from which we can never wake.  Instead we must do what we can to fight against what makes it a nightmare, and that is ugly and difficult.  It helps to look at what people have done that have survived for longer than 10 years, which means looking to the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, China, North Korea, all these countries that we’re not supposed to look at because they’re “authoritarian”.  And it means looking at the ones that didn’t survive long either — rest in power, Comrade Sankara! — to understand why they were able to be defeated and try to avoid similar defeats if possible.

I don’t have a list of those historical examples from Anarchists other than the Zapatistas and Rojava, both of which have heavy asterisks (Zapatistas don’t even call themselves anarchist; Rojava had to make a deal with The Great Satan to win its wars against Daesh and it paid the devil’s price).  The Liberals are even worse, as they give me historical examples which are all brutal genocidal colonialist states whose crimes they either wave away or dismiss as a result of corruption (not venal, but spiritual) that has been purged or will be purged.  The liberals live in a dream too, a dream where AmriKKKa wasn’t evil from the start, where France and Britain were not evil empires.  They reject reality because the dream is so much more soothing.

“Another world is possible”, the dreamers say at these community meetings where people dream and brainstorm other ways of being.  But it’s always abstract, hypothetical, nebulous.  Their zines ask thought-provoking questions without proposing hard answers that can be cross-examined, and perhaps they must never pin down something specific because specifics can be evaluated and scrutinized, and the dream cannot survive scrutiny.

“Another world is possible because it was possible, we had it” said anarchists who recommended to me The Dawn of Everything, and they were silent when I brought up serious critiques I’d read of it which point out its many methodological flaws.

“If you will it, it is no dream” arch-Zionist Theodor Herzl said.  Evola and Nietzsche were both quite taken with the dream of a past that never was.  Is it inherently reactionary to fixate so much on dreams instead of on hard reality?

I think there’s a difference between saying “I think things should be different in these ways, both vague and specific, and I am willing to fight for that and to take steps to achieve those changes even though they may not happen in my lifetime because I may die in the struggle”, which is what I think Marxist-Leninists do, and dreaming of a nebulous future wherein things will just work out if we want it badly enough to figure out the details later.

The union of those threads:

Thread 1, speculative fiction, and thread 2, denial of reality and emphasis on dreams, intersect.  What is speculative fiction but a fictional exploration of dreams?  In a fictional story, anything can go because the author can write it so.  Sherlock Holmes can solve any mystery because the universe is created to allow him to do so, save for when his own genius must be subverted for the sake of the plot.  Margaret Killjoy’s anarchist commune can win the asymmetrical war.  The boys on that island can turn against each other and fall to barbarism rather than what actually happened when boys were stranded at sea.  In all cases they are the argument the author puts forth to defend their views, but then they become examples people can point to as proof of those views, as if fiction is somehow not made up!  And these threads intersect with that Sim Kerns “tankies are calvinists” thread — Sim decries commenters who bring up the very real fact that social democratic politicians keep betraying the socialist part of their base, or that social democracy does not even attempt to acknowledge the problems of imperialism but simply focuses on redistributing the spoils of said imperialism.  Sim retreats into the dream that a better world is possible through elections.  (I think?  The video has actually been taken down before I could watch it so I’ve only seen clips).  I found this comment in a Hexbear thread on their take though, detailing the blurb for a book they wrote: https://hexbear.net/comment/7190533

 In an alternate 2020 timeline, Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a War on Climate Change rather than a War on Terror. For twenty years, Democrats have controlled all three branches of government, enacting carbon-cutting schemes that never made it to a vote in our world. Green infrastructure projects have transformed U.S. cities into lush paradises (for the wealthy, white neighborhoods, at least), and the Bureau of Carbon Regulation levies carbon taxes on every financial transaction.

English teacher by day, Maddie Ryan spends her nights and weekends as the rhythm guitarist of Bunny Bloodlust, a queer punk band living in a warehouse-turned-venue called “The Lab” in Houston’s Eighth Ward. When Maddie learns that the Eighth Ward is to be sacrificed for a new electromagnetic hyperway out to the wealthy, white suburbs, she joins “Save the Eighth,” a Black-led organizing movement fighting for the neighborhood. At first, she’s only focused on keeping her band together and getting closer to Red, their reckless and enigmatic lead guitarist. But working with Save the Eighth forces Maddie to reckon with the harm she has already done to the neighborhood—both as a resident of the gentrifying Lab and as a white teacher in a predominantly Black school.

When police respond to Save the Eighth protests with violence, the Lab becomes the epicenter of “The Free People’s Village”—an occupation that promises to be the birthplace of an anti-capitalist revolution. As the movement spreads across the U.S., Maddie dreams of a queer, liberated future with Red. But the Village is beset on all sides—by infighting, police brutality, corporate-owned media, and rising ecofascism. Maddie’s found family is increasingly at risk from state violence, and she must decide if she’s willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of justice.

What on earth.  What the actual fuck.  I cannot express verbally my horror.  Oh wait we have emotes.    This is speculative fiction!  This is a radlib fever dream.  (I do not know Sim Kern’s politics other than that apparently they oppose Iϟϟntreal’s genocide in Palestine, and they hate “tankies”, so I don’t know what to call them but the vibe I get is somewhere in between liberal and anarchist, hence “radlib”).

I keep coming back to this:  when I ask liberals and anarchists to demonstrate their politics, they point to fiction, that is, things that by definition have not happened.  When I ask Communists, they point to history, that is, things that actually happened.  “But history is booooooring”, say consumers of slop.  History is hard.  They turn to the realm of dreams instead.

Dreams can be comforting, and they outcompete bleaker material analysis precisely because they allow people to avoid looking at how fucked things are and how much of an uphill battle we have.

I have to ask then, is there value in writing Communist speculative fiction?  I don’t want to say fiction is inherently reactionary and cede that ground.  I love reading fiction.  I’ve enjoyed writing a few stories, and I have ideas for many more myself.  Or is that counterproductive, because our task is not to lie to people, not to encourage people to stay in the realm of dreams where they can avoid grappling with reality, but to teach people about the real world?

My current partner is the first person I’ve ever dated who was not a big reader when young.  They mostly read nonfiction.  And it got me wondering if perhaps, much as being a “reader” and an “intellectual” is fetishized, there is not just as much value and honor in being fully immersed in the world, in the present, in the here and now, grappling with material reality as it is, enjoying what is to be enjoyed and fighting what is not?

Fuck it I have no idea what I’m saying anymore but I’ve procrastinated long enough.  Time to go read more about heat mitigation so I don’t boil.   I may even do my dishes.

I talked to them and they were pretty nice. Tried to sell me a newspaper though! But I expected them to do that.

This is more of a rant if anything, but I'm just fed up of having to baby every single person in this damn company who is all in on AI programming shit??? meanwhile I'm having to rewrite ship over and over and over and over because the AI sloppers don't actually know what they've written, and now I'm needing to refactor shit from the ground up so at least someone understands it??? and the problem is if I bring this up in any reasonable grown up way so as "why the fuck have you rewritten my code and not tested it so this features I've worked hours on are now completely broken until I come back to check on them???" I would obviously be the problem here.

to make things worse, being neurodivergent at work means that you are cursed with constantly finding shit that makes life more difficult for everyone, not getting any of the praise for fixing it, and not being able to formulate why the fuck these people are being so disruptive to everyone else's productivity in the first place. I just want to code shit, I don't want to have the constantly relearn what someone else can't be bothered to learn themselves, and then get told but I'm not doing enough to log what work I'm doing.

it's like I'm doing basic IT support for these fuckers too, asking me basic shit like why is this thing not working and they've just clearly not clicked the big fucking link so they can read why it isn't working so they'd understand it better. they just expect you to slop it onto their plate as if you're the AI agent for them. that's why this shit is so popular with people who don't know a thing about programming: they get to have all of the credit for writing something but not have to admit that not only do they not know shit but they're actually relying on other people to know the shit for them. pure entitlement complex.

and yeah, maybe I'm a bit of a purist who sees his work is a bit more of a craft rather than a disgusting episode of life to get through as quickly as possible. fine. but it gets to the point where I'm almost sick of seeing code and sick of writing it and dealing with it all because I have to constantly be exposed to stuff that doesn't work because no one gives a shit. maybe that's why I'm getting more into carpentry recently.

I love carniverous plants.

I have never had a "nice" cigar but the one I had was enjoyable. Are they worth the price?

Most notably all of these "never-Trumpers" and people from the Lincoln project.

But then I thought: damn it has always been like this...

Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson both used to have shows on MSNBC. Of course we're talking about corporate media. It just goes to show the absolute kayfabe that goes on in dressing up the political identity of your media outlet, just to sell shit to a different demographic of people.