Been seeing "Finland has eradicated homelesness" posts a lot from typically "socialism is when the government does stuff"-leftists or some AmeriKKKan Bernie lib and it has become such an angering thing for me. It is all neoliberal country branding.

That is all it is. Our shitty pseudo-leftist nato loving "modern left" party has gone around flexing about their progressive housing program. The party has no power, zero. It means nothing.

I work with homeless people, in Finland. Where almost all housing has been privatized. Where the state support has been cut to a level no poor person can meet. If ones rent goes over this state mandated limit, people are forced to move. This leads to movement into rural areas where there is no work or services, factually creating segregation.

If you have a mark on your credit, nobody rents to you. I spend my time trying to house these people and every time I see this meme/info floated on the internet I become more annoyed.

The next time anyone goes "oh look at that socialist finland eradicating homelessness" you can say that this neoliberal austerity hell has nothing whatsoever to do with socialism, never really did and they definitely have not eradicated anything.

Early autumn loot is really getting started where I live. Chantarelles have been abundant for weeks now and these guys are just now starting to surface, about three weeks earlier than last year. And looking at how much small ones there were, it's going to be an epic year for mushroom drying. This truly is the poor mans truffle.

This is just next level.

I too always like it when I get to choose who oppresses me, makes it feel so much better./s

(No links, because not sure how big or small of an account this Harris lib has. Screenshotted from Mastodon.)

Ffs been listening to the yelling of a pathetic little nazi next door for over a year now at least two nights a week.

As I sit here on my couch on a Friday, brain fried from work, this fucking guy just yells his hate into the void and never shuts up! It's like an endless rant from this poor mans Alex Jones that is just constant. He hollers and yells about "the immigrants" endlessly.

Last week he did this shit with his window open so I recorded it. Went on an on about how he sure lives on welfare, but HE has a right to it because in his mind welfare is for WHITE PEOPLE. And he makes sure to constantly mention how immigrants are all rapists etc. How they all came hear to steal jobs. Also thinks Trump is amazing. And we aren't even in AmeriKKKa.

It's vile, constant, disgusting hate speech and this is like max a 20 year old guy who has never held a job and yet lives in good housing, has a car and is secure, meanwhile the people I work with are homeless while driving doordash for shitheads like him. I cannot find in me any solidarity for this person whatsoever, I have tried. He proudly proclaimes how he doesn't even want to work and how the benefits he gets are too small because of, you guessed it, immigrants. He hates women and queers deeply too and I know all this because I get to enjoy this show every single week, several nights a week.

This loser does not shut up even for a second, who the f listens to that!? Somebody clearly does. There is no point in reporting this anywhere either, because the only place I can do that to is the cops who are fash and basically agree with this asshole. Isn't it funny how the place that should handle hate speech is the literal fash central itself, such nordic country justice...

I have made like ten complaints to our housing manager, this is social housing. It has done nothing. I am at the point where I want to go do something stupid and I just need to vent. I can't with the hate this guy is spewing, it's unreal. It scares me, it makes me so incredible angry and most of of all it makes me feel entirely helpless because there is nothing and no-one left who would care or do something to stop this. His views are basically the popular position now and it is making me panic.

And I can't confront a guy who talks about killing people. I am not brave enough for that. I don't know what to do. All I know is that when the snow comes I will write NAZI on his shit car every day when I walk past it.

Saw this posted online. It's uhm, very interesting. Also uses the word "tankie".

Found info of a New York based ngo from the site, but anyone know what this is about?

I don't even know how to start unpacking this, but I just need to vent about it. I am late self-diagnosed audhd afab, gen X who has learnt a lot of unhealthy hustle culture and looking busy brainworms over the years. Been down the burnout path a few times too before I realized my neurotype around 2020.

I am currently working in a client facing, but also laptop touching position where I am constantly "out of work". I am always on top of the things I should do, because I always do them right away or otherwise I know I would forget them. I have constant "impostor syndrome" and question myself on whether I am doing enough, because I always end up with all this downtime. The work has no set structure and we very much manage ourselves. I have secretly compared my calender to my coworkers and I tend to have more client appointments than most, yet for example this week I have just been bored out of my mind for days. And questioning if I am somehow doing this wrong.

I am having a remote day today and am just here posting. I don't know why I feel weird about it when rationally I know that I very much earn my wage and just do the work differently than others. I for example write very fast. And solve things very fast.

But my question remains, do neurotypicals just fake it? Or do they think they are busy all the time? I for one do a lot of remote work and at the office I introvert it. I am always about the work, not socializing much, so my worktime never goes to those things.

I eat at my desk while I work too, I tried the neurotypical style of taking breaks, but it just doesn't work for me mid-task. My breaks are the bus drives to clients houses or slacking in the morning pretending to be online in Teams.

But I am having to do a lot of pretending and I think that is the part that is draining me. I actually really like my work and am probably pretty good at it, but this keeping up appearances stuff is exhausting and causes all kinds of self doubt.

I did teaching previously and the daily structure in it with the shorter day was a lot easier to handle. But I can't find things to do for eight hours in my current work. And I know nobody works eight hours in the office, but why is the pretend so hard for me? I feel weird listening to audiobooks in my worktime and I want to stop feeling that way, but I think it's the autistic lawful good that makes me feel kind of bad about it.

So, I haven't done much travelling in my life because been poor, but am now in a position to maybe plan a trip for myself and my partner. To China is where we would love to go.

I love train travel and dislike flying, did not enjoy the one trip over the Atlantic I have been on, so I was thinking about taking the trans-Siberia train to Peking, but it looks like I can't actually get to it now from Finland. I also don't really want to fly for climate reasons. There used to be a train straight to Moscow from Helsinki, but the warmongering started and now there is nothing. Also I keep getting 404s when searching for flights to Russia, the flight to Moscow to get to the train wouldn't be so bad.

Is it really not possible to go do this train trip from Europe atm? Anybody know? Been searching the internet and there is very little info on this or other train access to China from Europe. I found freight trains.

I am one of those who is both adventurous and seeks planned things at the same time, so would have to have a good premade plan and bookings for the trip. I was thinking we could do the highspeed rail in China to sort of travel across the country from Peking to Shanghai. Would be a month long thing at least, after I finish my masters and current work contract.

But looks like it isn't easily doable.

It's all like this. I don't even understand where the stuff in this page is coming from, but "coercion and violence of communist rule" is once again just thrown in there.

Also this book seems to really be looking down on the working class from my reading, although I suppose it tries to highlight some issues. Not to mention all the discourse about social capital or other types of capital, but never actual capital.

This also reads like a weird sort of celebration of neoliberalism as inevitable, but then again I am just so tired of reading stuff like this that I am probably not giving it much credit.

Book is called "masculinity, labor and neoliberalism".

So what are your plans for May Day 2024?

I am thinking we will go visit a Red memorial and watch the ceremony there, then maybe some marching and singing with comrades.

Maybe it isn't about good/bad, maybe consider anti-imperialism?

(An anarchist account from Masto that has quite the following so posting here, but without links.)

Edit. Added a link to the thread because it keeps getting boosted to my timeline by Western "leftists" and I think it deserves to be dunked on.

The fuck this Timo guy saying? This reads like peak Jordan Peterson thought aka thoughts from a pseudointellectual bullshit generator.

Yesterday I boosted a post over on Mastodon that was a sort of meme about all the ridiculous ways the US thinks China is spying on it. It was then commented on by a comrade, a Vietnam refugee who has almost died of polio back in the day in a refugee camp. To this then a "Finnish leftist" follower of mine had the nerve to descend and started sealioning and schooling this other person on all the lib talking points about China, like Uyghur genocide. Threw in Russia and "our brave smol bean country struggle" of fighting Russia for centuries.

Then today I got the latest edition of our Left Alliance newspaper. It opens with an editorial headlined: "Russia is still warmongering, alone". This is saying that Russia and Russia alone is and has and will do all the pushing for war. The link is to this, but its paywalled and in Finnish for which I am sorry (can take a pic of the editorial later if someone wants it, will still be in Finnish though and its really not worth anyones time).

Then we have a presidential election here, also strikes going on.

In my uni none of my lecturers took part in the walkout, the only measure the labor aristro union got together, they were all like "can't disrupt a legally chosen government".

The two presidential candidates are both turbo level neolibs. Basically Macron, times two. They perfectly embody our situation here and if you don't vote for either you are a bad person for democracy.

If anyone is familiar with the history of Finland and the very strong fascict project we had and have here it is both scary and depressing to see the level in which this liberal thought and rewriting of history has saturated most minds in my lifetime. I remember as a young adult when the capitalist takes on things like finlandization still got pushback. It feels like it all fell apart as the Soviet fell and neoliberalism was made hegemonic.

The takes I see today about this country and its history and on world politics and history are all ahistorical carbage that is so hegemonic you can't even start to debate on it as what people think they know, is so far removed from what actually happened, the gap would need years of re-education to breach.

I sometimes think about all this and feel like here the fash have already won. They did win originally too, but we had some progressive forces and the Soviet right there that kept them in a sort of leash, but not a day went by without them pushing their right wing anti-communist propaganda on everything. Media, entertainment, arts, public discourse. Everything. Even comics were brought here with the capitalist mission in mind as the capitalist class wanted to re-educate the working class fully after the civil war.

The nationalistic rise in the beginning of the 90s was when they reframed the ww2 war time in its entirety and we all bought the winter war myths and other crap.The nazi soldiers that Germany trained for us were framed 100% as heroes for example. There were an endless parade of teary eyed veterans and Karelian refugees talking about the scary Soviet and the price of our independence. I bought a of it at the time too. There was never a mention of the nazi question. Not in school, not in public discourse. This has sufraced just in the last few years and has mostly been swept under the rug, but there are some good studies and writing by the petty bourge academics on how leftists were treated here during the war. None of this reaches the mainstream though, our media is all controlled by the capitalist class.

I think a part of why making people see the fascism here is that if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that we were and are on the wrond side of history and for all the wrong reasons.

This makes for one lonely place to be a communist. Even though I have my kid and partner who are also comrades, the rest of my social surroundings mostly feels hopeless. I look at the endless liberal whining about this and that on social media or listen to it in real life, and all I want to do is yell to them to read even one book outside the isle of "How to be the most obnoxiously privileged & clueless, but confident Nordic person."

We do have a communist workers party, I get that newspaper too. It's like a handful of peoole who are very stigmatized and shunned by being comrades. This took the capitalist about 100 years to reach, but they got there. There is no Left left here now. How do we come back from this?