This was an extremely informative read. It answered a number of questions I've had rattling in my brain that I just never dug around enough to get good information on. Thank you for these comments.

Just because you aren't used to hearing about the vast reality beyond the propaganda bubble you've (knowingly or unknowingly) confined yourself to, that doesn't mean that something you encounter outside of that bubble that contradicts it isn't factually the truth. If anything, as a rule of thumb, it's more likely to be closer to the truth if it contradicts whatever narrative nonsense you've been swallowing from any given large western media news outlet.

Bro, learn to read paragraphs. My comment above is literally made up of two of them of very normal and standard size. Have you ever read a book? Paragraphs written in places other than twitter or reddit tend not to be broken up arbitrarily every 2 sentences like it seems you wanted me to do.

For what it's worth, I agree with you on almost all of that. I think the main difference here is that I see the labor theory of value as being much more fundamental to Marxism than just, as you put it, one facet of it. It's very difficult to keep Marxism as a whole if you toss out the LToV, since the whole structure would begin to crumble. It may be possible for similar models to be put in its place to prevent the crumble, but I think that those models would have to be close enough to the LToV that the distinctions wouldn't really matter except to academics. (edit, fixed a word)

You're right that fasting is beneficial in part because it temporarily cuts off the intake all the poisonous shit in a typical diet, but there are all kinds of other very real physiological and evolutionary reasons that people feel better and get health benefits from fasting. It's something that has been well known and commonly reported since long before microplastics and all the other modern poisons we're exposed to. Fasting is one of those things you can find throughout history and in all sorts of different cultures as a remedy and spiritual practice... and has been confirmed by modern medicine.

Another thing to keep in mind is that fasting actually wouldn't help a person feel better with respect to a lot of those poisons which are more of a slow, long-term detriment, where briefly stopping their intake before starting again wouldn't change your immediate experience. Since you mentioned lead, if a person has been getting small amounts of lead over long periods of time, suddenly not getting any lead for a couple days isn't going to make them feel any better in large part because lead gets deposited in the bones and will keep poisoning someone even after they stop consuming it. Lead also causes at least some irreversible neuronal damage, especially to people exposed in childhood which makes it so fucking insidious and evil that our overlords intentionally continue to allow it to be a problem in poor and minority communities. Fasting isn't going to make those lead-poisoned kids or the adults they become suddenly feel less lead-poisoned. But it might make them feel better for other reasons.

Yeah, that's not the reason. The gas that causes flatulence has essentially nothing to do with swallowing air. If you want to nerd out on her the next time she says that, see my response to CTHlurker.

That's pretty normal (but not true for everyone because of the uniqueness and individuality of our gut micriobiomes). The first thing to know is that your bowels aren't actually empty for quite a while after you stop eating, there's still plenty in there to process. For most people, what kind of marks the end of what's left of the food in there is when they have diarrhea about 2-5 days into a true fast. Even then, your gut lining is still constantly growing, dying, and shedding, just like your skin, and fasting can make that shedding happen faster and more efficiently. It's literally exfoliation for the gut, but that's not really relevant until it's been a few days since you've eaten anything.

What actually causes gas, as you probably know, is the bacteria in your gut processing what's in there. Your gas is the product of their digestion. They're still doing their thing to the remaining food (which again, there is still a substantial amount of for days into a fast) and your exfoliating intestines even when you're fasting. The thing to understand here is that when you fast, your gut micriobiome will change in response to the changed conditions it's experiencing. This takes some time to balance out, since your micriobome is an entire ecosystem of competing species adapting to that relatively sudden change. This temporary imbalance is the biggest (but not the only) reason for the increase in gas when you start fasting, as bacteria types that used to be in the minority are now in overabundance, like an algae bloom in a pond. People who eat beans all the time usually don't get gassy from eating a bean burrito for dinner since their microbiome is adapted to that, but someone with an unadapted gut will get major gas from the same burrito. Fasting can actually be a fairly similar scenario in terms of the sudden change.

Long story short, there's so much more going on here than just the volume of food you ate. Hope that helps.

I edited this comment for clarity and because I accidentally said something backwards initially:

Hmm, it should be plainly obvious if someone is encrypting their messages to you. Like, what I think you're describing couldn't even work by accident. Other people's keys can't be used. If someone wants to communicate with you, they need your public key to encrypt their message to you and only you can then decrypt that message with your private key. If you then want to respond, you need their public key to encrypt your response, which only they can decrypt.

Example: if a buyer contacts a vendor, the buyer is not using their (the buyer's) own key. The buyer must use the vendor's public key to encrypt a message that the vendor then decrypts locally (which only the vendor can do with their private key). If the buyer used any other key, the vendor couldn't decrypt the message and no transaction could proceed. If the vendor wants to then send a message to the buyer, that's when the vendor uses the buyer's public key to encrypt that message. If the buyer gave the vendor any public key that is not their own, that buyer then couldn't decrypt the message the vendor sent them. There's really no place in this process where the vendor wouldn't know if the buyer was using their own PGP key.

In my past experience, people would put their public keys in their profile. The auto-encryption doesn't even look like encryption, it just looks like sending messages normally, the same way it looks using any encrypted messenger service: you just accept and trust that the service really is encrypting and decrypting at both ends and all you see is the text that someone sends you. There are steps both you and the person you're talking to have to take when doing your own encryption. Even when you're using PGP, you're still sending text over the market messaging system, and the market is encrypting that, but the text you're sending will look like total gibberish to everyone. Not just to the market, but it will look like total gibberish even to you after you encrypted the text locally on your own device, and of course it will also look like total gibberish to the person you're sending it to until they decrypt it locally on their end. There really should be no room for confusing who's public key is being used, not even mistakenly because the decryption wouldn't work. Unless I'm still misunderstanding you, or unless communication methods on the DNMs have so drastically changed in recent years that they're incomparable, but I know that's not the case.

I've also noticed this with duckduckgo in particular. I wondered if I was being paranoid and was just witnessing the usual imperialist bias of the English-speaking web. I decided it must be both worse than normal and intentional after doing some generic search for information on Islamic organizations and seeing that every fucking result on the first page had "terrorist organization" in the description. Even after using "-terrorist" I was still getting all pro-Zionist results or "neutral," "both-sides" (at best) results. I tried the search on google, which I normally avoid like the plague, and was surprised to actually get some reasonable returns on the first try.

It's been 7 hours, so I'm guessing the last one got snagged. But if not, I'll claim it.

No one ever said we are always right, and we can't be, because our internal struggle sessions are well know. We weren't even able to federate for 3 years due to incompatible code, and in that time, disagreed (to put it lightly) on things all the time in ways where both sides can't be right. I realize it can be convenient for you to talk about people you're trying to disparage as a monolith, but I assure you, no hexbear thinks hexbears are always right.

But when it comes to actually knowing shit about geopolitics, and understanding realities beyond the narrative that has been crafted to justify the ruling class' dominance and hegemony, it's hard to get it wrong when you're talking to propagandized liberals who eat up that narrative like good little unquestioning beneficiaries of empire. That much is true.