Welcome everyone! Make yourself at home in our time-honored tradition, the weekly discussion thread!
P.S. As your matrix server overlord friendly server admin, I would like to announce that I am working on some uh… stability improvements. Some might call them enhancements. Don’t ask what I’m enhancing. Anyway, the uptime will be… better. Probably. >:3
• Matrix homeserver and space
• Theory discussion group now on Lemmygrad
• Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen
Capitalist flavors of thought are pretty bizarre. You get Nihilist Flavor, which is like “everything is impermanent and meaningless, enjoy it while you can, YOLO.” And you get Cotton Candy Health Flavor, which is like “you should try to live in a sustainable way; be healthy, exercise regularly, eat your vegetables, brush your teeth, sleep well… why? shoves ‘so you can work longer for the capitalist’ under the rug… uh, so you can savor the Nihilist Flavor for much longer”.
“But I want to be a part of something that matters.”
“Oh yes, so we’ve got Product Fandom, Colonized Religion, ‘Family’ Workplace, and a variety of cults.”
“Aren’t all of those cults?”
“Stop resisting!”
did a ton of yard-work today for a lady; planted three beds, filled 5 more, did some work on a chicken-coop and each one of those beds needed a good 50/50 mix so it was a removed turning them after weeding all of them.
made good cash, I’m happy about it.
What’s the downfall of Trump going to look like? I feel like he’s going to get to comfortable age and die while MAGA far outlives him. He was useful in building the movement but I have to imagine the billionaire class is ready for him to kick the bucket here soon so he’s out of the way
trump is never going to die. The whitehouse ball room is just a cover for a super computer and biotech lab under the white house where trumps consciousness will get digitized and linked in to the whitehouse intranet so he can live forever as the machine god of usa. (this is a joke. but it might be what is going on with the ball room but obviously it is just a grift and wont work)
You joke, but we live in a world with an empire that is unhinged enough I could honestly see Trump dying quietly and they try to replace him with AI and hide the fact that he’s dead.
I was watching the Eurovision final in the bar and me and some other people were booing Israel whenever they came on. Some people had scorecards and I could see that some of them had scribbled out Israel. Right before the final result was revealed me and another girl who was booing Israel in the bar were holding hands in suspence and when finally Bulgaria won the bar went wild. Great to see.
Things are not looking good in Bolivia, folks. The US is planning to destroy the resistance there while US puppets are rushing to the aid of the neoliberal puppet Rodrigo Paz.
Striking workers have erected barricades blocking highways in every region of the country.
i pray and pray all of these simultaneous interventions can in some way overextend them and worsen things but none of that would be happy so much as it is only a minimal reassurance. the death throes include trying to take everyone down with them, but it’s just such unfair suffering
lamine yamal you goated son of a gun
Edit to add context, he raised a palestine flag at some like celebration through spain. safer place to do it but it’s still awesome, and he’s young and mega famous. i dont know anything about football though. however… he also did go to dubai and make a long ass vid about it which is corny as fuck.
A lot of people don’t trust certain parts of society such as the homeless and I understand why. I wouldn’t trust a mafia boss or a mobster, someone with a record for willingness to do crime against the defenseless. It’s a fascist mentality.
However I would like to add my two cents with brief experience of homelessness and just general interactions with a broad section of lumpen. Be it street musicians or prostitutes. Sadly I only have anecdotes on my side which is part of the issue, it’s very difficult to do empirical research on this subject and avoid biases.
In my brief experience of homelessness the only person who immediately approached me was another homeless person. He immediately noticed that something wasn’t right with me and came with advice, in the meanwhile I’ve likely had more than a 1000 people walk past me without a care and you might wonder why didn’t I go to an institution? Well because they dismantled them.
Marxism is based on Dialectical-Materialism, it means the body is the mind is the body and practical experience is necessary for change to happen. You cannot simply “fix” someone with a mental exercise. I think many Chauvinists dismiss the lumpen because they toss them a book and expect class consciousness to sort it out. It’s not that simple, change needs structure that supports it.
I have found this one of the major weakness of the modern day left movement. There is a lot of effort trying to pull down the petite bourgeoise, not a lot of efforts pulling up the disenfranchised. It ends up being left upon a religious institution, the Heartfelt liberal or the extraordinarily rare mutual-aid group. All of which get infiltrated by the right.
I have never encountered a communist in the presence of the “lower classes” but I have had reactionaries try to befriend me and idk if people realize how far the influences of 1 neo-fash can spread. So this guy I will call him Measurehead, because that’s what his personality was like, yeah a competitive racist. But the guy literally inserted himself anywhere and he’s been all the way to China and around. Which has really bothered me because this is the kind of people who go around to the lumpen everywhere and spread their ideology. This one guy has probably ended up influencing hundreds by now if not more. And he was so good at gathering a crowd around him it’s like scary to see. The way how he immediately could spot who to turn to in order to gather a crowd around him.
It scares me because the sort of people who get co-opted by the likes of him include people who would be willing to work tripple shifts for half of the pay. Regardless how one feels about the downtrodden, you’re going to have to deal with them. That is a fact. This is the reason why I have been trying to shine a little bit of a light on the issue. It’s not just because I’ve read Mao or Malcom or Che, although I believe their personal life experiences had influenced them to arrive to similar conclusions.
It’s a good reminder, thanks for bringing it up. It’s a strategic thing and, more importantly, a humane thing. We should be doing what we can to uplift the most downtrodden, which means empowering, educating, building ties, etc. As opposed to looking at it in a distanced charity sort of way, the way that the capitalist class does.
I think many Chauvinists dismiss the lumpen because they toss them a book and expect class consciousness to sort it out. It’s not that simple, change needs structure that supports it.
I think this is in some ways a symptom of individualism, the tendency to approach it in this way. You could have 50 people read the same book independently and draw wildly different interpretations. Education is an organized process, not a matter of pointing in a vague direction and hoping.
Is it weird that I mostly call refer to trump as Donald or Donny instead of president trump?
No that’s pretty normal. I like to call the king of britain King Chuckles or if he is the topic of the conversation I like to call him Chuckles the Clown.
Hello peeps! I know that SlayGuevara said that I could link the mutual aid post in the mutual aid community, but I asked Moderator GrainEater and they said that it is ok (content warning for abuse towards children): https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11615234?scrollToComments=true
Edit: They were banned (they did not post with an account in Lemmygrad, so it was part of another site that banned them)! The posts were removed as a result.
I was recommended Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) recently.
Could be better than just more CBT.
What do you think?
i tried DBT after CBT and found it much much better. depends on the specialist of course
Definitely depends on the specialist themselves, yeah
Do you have any resources? Never heard the term. Would be interested to see how it stacks up. Read: I can ask a Vietnamese therapist about it :P (I have no psychology knowledge myself lol)
Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional.
You should definitely try DBT because its a new tool that might help you.
first thoughts that were really pessimistic
Did the person recommending DBT address capitalism as a major root of your suffering or are they just trying to sell you another cure without naming the problem? Therapists and social workers are basically cops. Their job is to keep people in line and not asking the real questions. Mental health professional education is permeated with individualism and white supremacy. Even the ones who think they are doing good are often just keeping their patients trying new things that wont work so they stay busy and keep coming to the next session. If they aren’t addressing capitalism, exploitation, and atomization then I doubt the efficacy of any treatment they suggest.
“Just one more pill bro, this one might work, Just try out this new mental exercise, I swear bro one of these will work, This one has a word you like.”
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely get what you are saying about addressing the root causes.
I just need something right now to help me get through things.
I get that completely.
But these were from other COMRADES, other Marxist-Leninists, not just anyone.
Also, the medication I have (Vyvanse especially) does help me function.
I was able to set up an appointment with that new place I was trying to go to! and got in rather quick to which is kind of surprising since my previous doctor, I had to like schedule four months ahead of time. But instead of dealing with that one place that refused to give a referral, I called the other place and talked to them about it and they were able to get my medical records and one of the medical staff reviewed and accepted it.
It is still really ridiculous that one place refused to write a referral, like again. It all just to set up an appointment to see someone. It’s not as if I was asking for something big.
Hey peeps, I want to help out a comrade here with their child legal case but I am unsure if I can link the original post here because it has to do with mutual aid. Do you peeps know if I can link it here (or any other way to help)?
There’s a mutual aid community
