1. Cuttlefish (those guys are full of surprises and are really cute)

2. Rabbits (Watership Down core)

3. Crows (endlessly cool)

4. Otters (absolute lil guy energy)

5. Bears (tuba music)

Recently got prescribed 10MG by my doctor because he thinks my anxiety is affecting my hypertension. Been about a month now and it seems like it's maybe working, my BP is down. So far no side affects, my Doc said it could affect my libido or even give me ED, but so far I can still... uhhh... do the deed just fine. Also no weight gain, if anything I've lost a few pounds.

Idk just curious people experiences.

We know the heads of Marxism are usually Marx, Engels and Lenin, often plus Stalin and Mao.

But who would be the five heads of revolutionary liberalism (before it became a totally bankrupt, anti-emancipatory, status quo project)?

My suggestion: John Locke, Thomas Paine, Robespierre, Toussaint, & Simon Bolivar

Also considered: Oliver Cromwell and Garibaldi

This org has been emailing me to apply for months. IDK how to feel about it. On one hand it's one of those things that probably looks good on a resume & being in D.C. would be sweet. OTOH this looks like a neoliberalism incubator... but I also need money.

For the purpose of miniature wargaming, I’m considering getting into 3D printing because there are tons of amazing sculpts I’d love to get my hands on.

A couple of questions, though

I’ll admit I know next to nothing about 3D printing, but I could spend up to 300 eurodollars (or a bit more) on a 3D printer. Are there any key things to consider when picking up a printer? I don’t need the cheapest model, as price isn’t the main reason I’m getting into 3D printing. I care quite a bit about the quality of the finished models.

I live in an apartment, so does this even work logistically? I’m aware there are some health hazards with resin/3D printing—how serious should my concerns be about that? (That’s why I’m asking here and not in a 3D printing subreddit, where folks might be biased.)

Are there any recommended communities or YouTube channels for 3D printing? As I mentioned, I’ll be using this primarily for gaming miniatures and possibly wargaming terrain, not for other 3D-printable items.

The idea that I’m referring to is basically that MRAs/pick-up artists and anti-abortion social conservatives are the same group of people with no meaningful distinctions between them.

An example of where I’ve seen this idea expressed:

You know those left-leaning meta subreddits like r/therightcantmeme and r/shitfascistssay that are largely about posting dumb right-wing stuff and then dogpiling on it together?

Earlier this year I saw a post (now deleted) on one of those subreddits where the content of the post was a manosphere-type meme that depicted a (attractive) man who got his (attractive) girlfriend pregnant and then, with help from his male friends, fled the country so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support. And the general tenor of the meme was supportive of this; basically the conceit was “being hot and scoring lots of noncommittal sex with hot women, without any concern for their well-being, is all that matters”.

Obviously this is an offensively terrible way to think about women, so the post got a lot of interaction and comments. But some of the comments caught my attention, because they tied in anti-abortion politics in a way that I think is kind of off the mark. One commenter said “The same guys who are anti abortion are the guys who laugh at stuff like this” and got a lot of upvotes.

I replied to them with something like “Huh? No, I don’t think that’s accurate. This is not a meme that anti-abortion social conservatives would find funny. This is a meme for ‘players’ who are misogynist in a lot of other ways, but generally support legal abortion.”

My comment got heavily downvoted. There were a couple of people who agreed with me and replied things like “lol you’re getting downvoted but you’re exactly right”, but those people got downvoted too.

Overall it seemed like the vast majority of people in that comment section disagreed with me, and believed that there really is no significant difference between anti-abortion Christian social conservatives and the MRA/PUA/Andrew Tate crowd.

I still think I'm right about this, though. What are your thoughts?

How commie should I be? We're supposed to have a book swap and idk if it's NYT bestsellers or Lenin. They've got a lot of "we'll take your name off if you're scared to associate with our group", but looking through the docs and all seems like completely normal stuff.

Anyone have any advice on just kind of hating people in general less? I look at people, I know they’re huge on religious doctrines and societal models I have no place in, and I just can’t see any good in them worth considering. I try to go outside and connect with people, but everyone looks like a 4channer, or someone two slights away from becoming a 4channer. I can’t restrain the fear or loathing. It’s like the past twenty years have reduced my very capacity for compassion and my capacity to respect anyone period to molten slag.

Heteronormative society and all who uphold it fucking blow, but I’m expected to keep it in my pants re: how and when I take it out on them.

Keep it light plz. For example, I am terrible terrible bowler. Just absolutely piss poor even compared to equally casual people, any time there's been some kinda get together involving bowling I have come in last by a huge huge margin. I need the bumpers. I can bowl a perfect game in wii sports tho.

FPS games as well, not really a fan and have never ever been able to hack it at them. After graphics got good enough I didn't find the perspective disorienting team sticks became the norm and I'm left handed so that was a weird thing to adjust to for me and by then it was 360 era CoD time and I wanted nothing to do with it and would just die 4 seconds into each spawn anyway.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/210431

This has been bothering me for a long time. A lot of this sounds like the videomaker just watched a documentary that had it out for the CPC and parroted the content verbatim with relatively little research into counter-theses.

Obviously I support beating the shit out of fake martial artists who purport to turn you into a ninja god, and there are surely many snakeoil salesmen in China as there are in America who therefore should be beaten. It also seems perfectly plausible that a good con would be able to take cover under the CPC initiative for cultural revitalization in order to scam people, even if that went counter to the initiative's goals.

But, the video seems to ultimately be aimed at smearing the CPC. For example, vaguely saying Xu "was made" to wear that clown makeup, not saying who made him, and adding in that same segment that the CPC docked his "social credit score", preventing him from taking some methods of transit.

Who made him wear the makeup? Probably the con/dojo he was challenging or possibly the promoters of the fight, but by speaking in vagaries and not defining different institutions, the videomaker makes it sound like these cons are working for the CPC and it's the CPC that made him present as a clown. It's as though there's just some homogeneous "Chinese institution" that Xu is traveling around and fighting different agents of, like the plot of a weird martial arts film.

Some things, like wiping social media, are really par for the course, but shutting his gym down and fining him massive amounts of money are included with no critical investigation of why they happened or even if they did, and are mentioned in the same breath as purely socially-driven harassment like the Taichi students obstructing him. It's all just unsubstantiated hearsay.

It reminds me of how often western press will report on defectors saying they are being attacked by the government [of Bad Country] for speaking out when -- while they did speak out -- they also in many cases did horrible shit like chop their girlfriend to pieces or lead an ethnonationalist campaign. The treatment of Navalny by western press is probably the easiest example unless you want to go back to the "moderate rebels" or "brave mujahideen freedom fighters" eras.

That said, getting good information on this as someone who doesn't speak Chinese is difficult, so I was wondering if other people here knew more about the story.

If the timestamp doesn't work, the correct url is: ( https://youtu.be/gjbSCEhmjJA?t=1155 )

feels like a dumb question but I’m asking it unironically lol. If I alternate eyes when non stop posting will I reduce the damage to my vision 🤔

can someone please make a Handala emoji?

Edit: this situation has now been resolved, according to anonymous sources... only vigorous self-crit and two fights.

For legal purposes, this is a joke.

What brought me here:
When breadtube became a thing around 2016 it was my refuge from the horrible reactionary shitshow the internet was at the time. It opened me to things further left than Obummer. I lurked on Reddits sorry excuses for leftist subs and heard them whisper about the CTH sub as being "bad leftists" but they never explained what was bad about them so I checked for myself and checked out the podcast and was like "They aren't bad they're just a bit obnoxious." I didn't really hang out on r/CTH, only saw the occasional post, and I listened to the podcast every now and again (and not at all anymore, stopped listening after the 2020 primaries) and that was about it. Then r/CTH was banned, this place was mentioned and I got curious. It felt like I had finally found a place that wasn't going to demand I be civil towards Nazis. I wasn't going to be banned for saying "kill all slave owners." I also thought you guys were really funny. So yeah, Ironally r/CTH made you guys more appealing lmao. It also helped that you retained the "fuck being civil to horrible people" energy while at the same time attempting to make sure marginalised groups weren't thrown under the bus.

What made me stay:
A community of weirdos that genuinely want to make the world a better place and stand up for their marginalised comrades. Whether it's the mutual aid comm helping people the best it can, the news comm shining a light on events the world tries to bury, or simply the movie comm providing a safe fun area to chill, I feel like this place provides something other places on the internet don't. It also is a place I feel like I can ask any questions about leftism and not be called an idiot. You guys taught me things ranging from practical stuff how to take part in my local org, to mundane things how to make a rad bean recipe. I think that's worth something. Also I still think you guys are hilarious.

EDIT: added some more context because I was reminded of stuff I had forgotten.

Wtf should I say? Should I ask what her fave Brace rule is?

I try reading about the Secret Treaties in Wikipedia, but it's not super conclusive.

I'm a longbow person because I value quantity over quality.

What should I actually do lol

I've read Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg, Engels, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, but I still lack any facial hair and I don't have the powers that I should already have by now. I haven't noticed any increase in stamina, not even the slightest bit. What am i missing? Is there something i've done wrong?

I think I understand the reactionary critique of democracy fairly well. It basically consists of the following:

• democracy is over-sanctified as a theoretical concept/ideal, and is a sham as it has actually been practiced
• It's impossible for large complex societies to be horizontally organized; they'll always be hierarchical, and the people at the top will never be entirely accountable to the people at the bottom. There will always be an elite.
• The reason that some countries are richer and more prosperous than others isn't because they're more democratic, it's because (a) they have better institutions regarding private property & rule of law, or (b) they just have more human capital
• some people are just morally/intellectually better than others and deserve to have more political power (e.g. right-wingers on Twitter, such as Matt Walsh, who say things like "you should have to pass a civics test in order to vote" or "voting should be restricted to people above a certain IQ/net worth")

However, I do not feel like I understand the Marxist critique of democracy very well. I know that leftist/Marxist skepticism of democracy (or at least liberal democracy) exists, but I don't really feel like I know what the full argument is. All I know currently is that I've observed internet leftists make various small individual assertions about democracy that, although I think they're mostly true, don't really come together to form a complete vision, and sometimes even contradict each other. These various assertions include the following:

• The US claims to be a democracy but is really more of an oligarchy
• the US was never a democracy
• bourgeois democracy can never be authentically democratic
• liberal democracy is really just colonial herrenvolk democracy and is too historically related to colonization to exist without it
• the bourgeois revolutions of the Enlightenment era were overrated
• democracy is kind of oversanctified and unachievable, and has really been turned into part of the liberal civic religion in Western countries; large societies are never really democratic (this is basically agreeing with the reactionary critique that I described above, at least parts of it)
• Democracy metrics/indices such as this one are basically just meaningless, contrived Western propaganda. It's impossible to know whether any country is really more democratic than any other one.
• China, Cuba, North Korea, Syria (maybe?), Russia (maybe?), and Iran (maybe?) are democratic, and so was the Soviet Union; they just have/had different democratic processes that seem strange and illegitimate to Westerners because of propaganda & cultural gaps.

I think all of the above are true or possibly true, but it seems unclear what's actually being argued for here. In particular, it seems like sometimes the argument being made is "democracy is good and worthwhile, but Western countries aren't really democratic", and other times the argument is "actually democracy is an illusion and not worth aspiring to in the first place".

I feel like I'm missing something here. Can anyone enlighten me? Is there a good text that makes this clear? (I'd prefer something short, like 2,000 words or so, but if you know a book that's relevant you can recommend that as well.)

Obviously lots of us have been concerned about this, but one thing I noticed recently are Ukrainians claiming the West is now supporting Russia, and if normal Ukrainians are saying this, then you just know the UkroNazis believe worse.

"No we're out right now."

"AHHHH BUT YOUR WEBSITE SAYS YOU DO HAVE IT! Hahaha I have owned you, you tricky LIAR!"

"The online inventory is frequently off."

"NOOOOOOOO!"

One of my oldest friends is a borderline anarcho syndicalist, but is reluctant to even consider a total rejection of capitalism because the alternative is something his entire world has convinced him is an equivalent immoral totalitarianism that is just another set of rich wankers enslaving people.

Anyway. I recently let him know that after Gaza, I consider the entire US state to be a bunch of psychopathic anti-humans, and that I think we have always been the bad guys, and the Soviets had the right idea, and their collapse was an epic tragedy for humanity.

He definitely was not receptive.

Now I think I have been dropping counter propaganda into our Signal chat too frequently, and I got some pushback from him after the election. Not sure what to make of it. Kinda worried I might have strained our friendship. He has firmly stated he is not interested in my Commie takes at all.

Gonna try to back off and chill out. But now I am kinda paranoid. Like, the US really has tried to ruin the lives of anyone who tries to have anything to do with Communism. What if the next four years starts some kinda new Red Scare? There's no way my friend will risk getting caught up in that, just to humor my ideological journey.

We both have kids to worry about. Both of us got raised in right winger families. His traditional US nationalists. Mine Evangelicals.

It's gonna be tough if I don't get to talk to one of my best friends about materialism and anti-imperialism.