DankZedong

joined 3 years ago
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[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 3 months ago

Doctors are alerting to be on edge about possible polio cases in the near future. Polio has been eradicated since the 60s here due to it being the only mandatory vaccine given to children. We are truly evolving backwards I think.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 3 months ago

Lumumba was a voice for an independent Africa, free of colonial oppression from the West. He was one of the leading figures in the movement that eventually freed Congo from Belgian occupation.

Lumumba was murdered in 1961 after he was transferred between prisons by rebel forces in the country during a civil war. Decades later, in 2000, the Belgian state admitted complicity to his murder.

 
[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If the topic is interesting to me then most of the time I do read them

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 3 months ago

This channel is about a guy who is into ecology but with a pretty decent anti capitalist view. In this video he wants to show some (mostly) native greenery but he also provides an insight in what it is to live in the Bay Area and how bad its homelessness situation is.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 3 months ago

I do. Even made a post about it one day and was kind of corrected by the Grad about it not being useful. They are right. Don't get me wrong I still get these feelings though. The other day I was preparing my bike to ride home when a colleague saw me and wanted to stop next to me. Two fuckers on an electric razor scooter who were speeding nearly crashed into him and started giving him shit for something he wasn't even in the wrong about. Even asking him if he needed a slapping, to which I jumped up and stood right in their faces saying that they now either needed to be the tough guys they think they are and slap me or move on. They moved on.

Now, if they started a fight I could've gotten seriously injured or maybe even dead, which would not benefit me at all. There is no use in fighting. But something about what you call pure, selfish, unbridled pieces of fucking shit makes me full of rage and I do want to claw their eyes out with a spoon.

I think it's good to stand up for yourself and others. After all that's a part of why we have this ideology I guess. On the other hand you do need to be cautious as some things just aren't worth potentially dying for.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 3 months ago

This reminds me of the 'simple living' people on Youtube who tell you a story about how they quit their job and opened up a veggie farm in the middle of nature. What they don't tell you is that they are now professional youtube stars who rent out expensive AirBnB's to city folks to make big money.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

Tragedy occurred today as I very unexpectedly lost a family member. The day has been kind of a blur and of course I am in a state of grief.

Despite all this one of the things I keep thinking about is work tomorrow, wondering if it's deserved for me not to go. If anyone came to me and asked me a question if they were in a similar situation, I'd say of course you should stay at home. For myself it's often more difficult, I find.

I just hate this system in which a natural and human thing to do, grieving, becomes a questionable thing because god forbid you miss out on a day of work. Fuck this system.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why do you guys have such oral fixations? Anytime someone says something you don't like they are supposedly sucking someone's dick. Putin's. Trump's. Whoever's.

Childish behavior. But then what do you expect with an ideology that is morally bankrupt.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I assume they have a PR team to discuss popularity of certain measures and with things like this I wonder how such a team can approve of gestures like this.

Like I feel it would be less insulting if he just gave some half ass apology on twitter. Maybe visit the area once or twice.

But 770 dollars? Once? Fuck me.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 4 months ago

I'm not sure if I'd say I'm less communist but I do sometimes feel uninspired to do something. Which I guess is normal. I have a busy but steady and decent paying job. I am able bodied. I have a good group of friends, good family relations, a good relationship. I have fun hobbies I can do. I am moderately well liked by most people I meet. In general, my life can be pretty good with only a few challenges at times.

Basically, at my current situation, I live in a system that is designed for me to profit off. I'm not getting the largest piece of the cake but I'm not on the bottom of the societal ladder either.

What this causes is that for me, the path of the least resistance in life, is to accept the status quo and to live life according to said status quo. It might give me a slight discomfort from time to time but I will probably have a decent life. I think it is natural, from an instinctal point of view, to follow a path that gives you little to no stress in which you don't have to fight that hard. After all, would I rather stand on a cold market talking to half interested people about communism or would I be doing something I actually enjoy? I think many comrades with me, if they had to be honest, would choose the latter.

However, I have also become aware of the unequality of our system. I am aware how I am in a privileged position purely because I was spawned in a certain part of the world, with a certain gender and a certain skin color. And because I think that is bullshit, I want to do something about that.

Communist organising is difficult. It takes a lot of time and effort and you very rarely get great results in our current societies. This causes you to have an ideology which you cannot always bring into practice as our current society is the direct opposite of said ideology. I think this can cause some dissonance to occur in your brain, which at times can be hard to overcome.

It's okay to take some time once in a while to reflect on where you stand. It's a privilege a lot of people, especially in the western left, have. But that doesn't mean you can't use it. Despite my personal challenges to stay organised or to find motivation to go out for the umpteenth time without a guaranteed result, I still believe communism is the way forward for humanity and I try my best not to lose hope, however difficult that can be.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's slightly less than the number of refugees Europe had to deal with in the last two decades. In total. All at once. There's no way the US will handle that well.

[–] DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Jesus Christ that would be a gigantic operation

 
 

While I don't necessarily agree with all the methods used in the vid I thought it was interesting to see how long term planning can have an enourmous effect when it comes to restoring greenery and wildlife in an otherwise deserted area

 

Considering our favorite Dutch reporter Bob went to the US, I figured I had to share him here

 
 

When I was first invited to Manifesta, the annual conference of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), I had no idea what to expect. I had never heard of the PTB, and I knew very little about Belgium — still less about Ostend, the coastal city where the conference took place.

Arriving at my hotel, a grand, imposing building flanked by rows of columns that stretched along the seafront, I felt like I had travelled back in time. I have an abiding memory of walking into the high-ceilinged restaurant for breakfast to be seated at a table next to a huge mural of an old Belgian tourist advertisement for Ostend, depicting a woman sporting a billowing white dress and a parasol.

Given the air of nostalgia that pervades the town, I expected that the PTB would be no different. Most Communist parties are not, after all, paragons of modernity. As I made my way to the event, I expected to enter a dull conference in a grey, rectangular building filled with old men surrounded by earnest young radicals.

So, when I approached the gates, I was more than a little taken aback. I was greeted by a young, enthusiastic activist, who whisked me past winding queues of people of all ages. They were waiting to be waved through the gates by stern-looking security guards checking bags and wristbands. I realised that this was not a conference, but a festival.

We walked through the main gates and arrived at the top of a flight of stone steps that looked out over a vast field filled with tents, food trucks, and thousands of people wandering across the grass. The thing that struck me most was the colour. Not the grey walls flecked with red that I had expected, but an explosion of greens, blues, pinks, and yellows, interspersed with Palestinian flags and the PTB’s logo — a red heart surrounding a white star.

Manifiesta is like The World Transformed on steroids. Guests from all over the world are invited to address the ranks of the PTB, and tickets are available to the general public, too. Alongside panel discussions and political rallies, there’s art, music, sports, and even a cinema. This year, more than 15,000 people attended.

The first time I spoke at Manifiesta in 2022, I was politically and emotionally burnt out. When Jeremy Corbyn lost the general election in 2019, and the world was plunged into lockdown, I refused to mourn. I held out hope for socialist movements in other parts of the world, and I imagined that perhaps the pandemic would revive the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity that has always been the foundation of the socialist movement.

By 2022, none of these hopes had come to fruition. I finally allowed my grief to catch up with me. Maybe we really had missed our moment of opportunity. Maybe democratic socialism really was a lost cause.

What I saw in Belgium suggested otherwise. Here was an example of a party mobilising the working class in all its diversity, with strong links to the labour movement, the climate movement, and an array of social movements, and a deep sense of international solidarity. It didn’t just tick all the boxes you would hope for in a modern, left-wing party — it was actually building power.

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