Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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When I see European countries overperforming in the world cup and consistenty beat non-European countries it reminds me that football infrastructure and economic development is still unequal. I hope that at the next world cup non-European countries have caught up a little.
Even the non European countries who perform well have their players either trained entirely by European academies or have their players in Europe from a young age. I feel like only Argentina, Brazil and maybe Egypt come somewhat close.
True, it’s sad. But I saw that Egypt’s players almost entirely play in the Egyptian league. I feel they are maybe the best example of a country not relying on Europe. I feel like even Brazil and Argentina send their best players to Europe before they turn 20.
Have a great week, everyone! We are all in this collective struggle together. Whenever you feel isolated or alone, remind yourself that you play a historic role along with the rest of the proletariat, and as such are not alone in this role.
As always, communism will win.
Thanks Cowbee. I hope the same for you.
Yeah
I just graduated from college, finally! For four years of arduous lessons, I successfully challenged them with determination, cooperation and devotion.
Congratz
Good stuff and great job.
deleted by creator
Congratulations!
Congrats!!!
Congrats!
Ankara is in lockdown thanks to the North Atlantic Terror Organization’s fear of looking weak during their summit, aka deciding their next crimes against humanity. It also shows that the current government of Turkey is nothing more than a colonial administration.
I can’t take a step outside without constant police surveillance. At least I didn’t get arrested because I have a potential to commit crimes against the American goons.
What’s that crime, you ask? Protesting, which became a felony under the Erdog sultanate. I want to commit stuff I can’t openly say because I’m convinced that Erdog’s ratting agents are looking at my posts.
Honestly, be careful
I am Turk and, well, every Turk I know hates the fucker
Edit: To be fair, I really do feel that the opposition is trash at this point
What opposition? CHP was always useless, and any other major parties were founded by the oppressors. I’ll vote for TİP, but I believe we need a violent uprising instead of relying in electoralism to truly become free.
Also, I’m surprised the popo didn’t bother knocking my door since I already had two lawsuits against me.
I am thirty-two-years-old today and I could hardly feel less enthusiastic.
A couple days ago I told somebody in my state that I feel lonely and she replied, ‘I hope you find ways to be less lonely.’ I can only guess that that was her way of saying that she’s still too busy to spend any time with me.
Discord is of little help. Almost everybody is either too busy to speak with me or finds it hard to connect with my interests. I tried returning to Feddit but they shadowbanned me and are obstinately ignoring my appeals.
I was so desperate for contact that I played Zombie Army Trilogy online for a few hours. It helped slightly but the other players were really quiet. I had to quit because it was making my hand smart.
I keep wishing that I never existed, but I know that some things would be worse off without me and I would piss a lot of people off if I did something to disappear prematurely.
It feels like almost nothing is getting better.
yeah…
Online interaction really doesn’t hit the spot does it. Its a bit like waving your hand over a bug bite.
Not existing is boring, permanent, and there is plenty of time for that later but while you continue to exist the possibility of things getting better is always there. Hang in there comrade.
i’m sorry about that. i often get resentful whenever i’m lonely for a while but i try to just think about what i like about myself, try to do anything to at least dampen the feelings even though it’s completely fair to feel miserable. we are not built for isolation, it’s not the way to live, and so to survive, when i was at my lowest, i would just occupy my brain with whatever to keep myself from sinking into self-hate, and i feel no shame or guilt. there’s no such thing as a bad reason to push forward, and there’s no shame in trying to survive and trying to drum up a desire to live. the fact of the matter is there’s just so much time nowadays where you end up lonely. i’m not gonna fault myself for the resulting anger, desolation, depression i may fall into, because. as i said, we’re social animals. our society is not very good for most humans at the moment, and having to simply try to grow around a feeling of isolation is not the solution, but it’s also something i’ve had to consign myself to.
i’ve been on the receiving end of being one of the only nodes in someone’s support system and it fucking hurts and it is not fair to them, (and i’ve also been on the other side, feeling as if i had noone to rely on but a few people), and i’ve been the person who has to leave, and i’ve been the person who’s been left. it is what it is, you will be distraught when you are losing contact, even if you cognitively know they have their own lives. the only thing you can do sometimes is be alone, because you can’t grip on and force someone to stay with you (even though people will come into your life, and there’s actually no reality save imprisonment that will force you into a life of eternal solitude, there’s always going to be an end to loneliness), and as such you just try to keep your head above water by any means you can. people will come back into your life, people similar to you exist and you’re not doomed to be lonely and miserable, but those meantimes where you are lonely fucking blow, don’t they? (especially if you’re neurodivergent but that’s another thing.). so i try to think about the person i’m stuck with and who is always with me (me) and i try to focus on what i like about her, what she can do to make my life easier, what she can do to make me happier. whatever that entails.
I keep wishing that I never existed, but I know that some things would be worse off without me and I would piss a lot of people off if I did something to disappear prematurely.
the language of ‘piss off’ makes me sad, don’t be apologetic. now, the verbiage of disappear prematurely is alarming but i’m going to hope you just meant ‘off the net’ and not something more severe. solitude is hard. solitude and isolation are also not what we were built for, not like this, but the difficult part is sometimes you just have to deal. i remember you posted once after black history month glumly and apologetically that you didn’t post enough here during this month. please stop imagining you have an obligation to anyone here, you should be posting for fun. and if the difficult part is lack of interaction, well, again, that sucks, but just know people see you and appreciate your articles, and if not that, i really hope you come to appreciate yourself on your own.
things will get better. on a global scale, surely, we inevitably move towards a better future. but our lives are short and our minds have to grapple with the fight of going day by day and it really is hard so i know that is hollow coming from someone that really doesn’t live your life. i hope things get better in your day to day life, truly. if comrades here aren’t active or you can’t talk to them, i always feel comforted by the bit that i’m slightly seen here, on such a small forum of likeminded people. and i’ve always seen your posts, and i’ve always thought you were a person with a sharp mind and a good sense of right and wrong. i don’t know if that means much, but i just hope you know that. there’s so many people you see and don’t express gratitude for early enough, but i wanted to say that. i’m certain many others feel the same. in the meantime, just try to reflect on what you do alone that makes you happy, what pasttime you might miss out on. drawing? writing? listening to music? maybe you should also try to join another lemmy instance that’s less political and small as this. maybe even tumblr (im sobbing thats a funny remark but that’s like one of the only social medias where i found regular connection, you can block out the attempts to push an algorithm, feed is chronological and only those u follow, there are MLs and anarchists, etc. so it is pretty good for a mainstream social media to curate a space and find ppl) i hope your day goes well, anarcho-bolshevik
My birthday was also a few days ago, I turned 31. I feel you honestly, though I’m not deprived of contact I still feel lonely most of the time, like I can’t talk to anyone about what is actually going on inside my head. On top of that life just seems to be getting harder and I need to find new ways of coping and handling it.
If you ever want to hangout or just start a conversation on Discord DM me here and I’ll share my username :)
Btw please never dissapear, your posts in Capitalism in Decay are some of the best on Lemmygrad <3
🫵 You WILL have hope, comrade.
I kinda do now.
I even think my video game anhedonia is breaking now.
Anhedonia is a new word for me. This is making me wonder if my ADHD+depression is actually ADHD+anhedonia 🤔
Woah. That might actually be what’s messing me up too. Thanks for posting this link! It does fit remarkably well to my experience
“Standard ADHD stimulant medications can sometimes blunt emotional experience in people where anhedonia is already prominent, making pre-treatment screening important”
I somewhat agree with this.
However, I still think some stimulant is necessary in my case.
That said, I am lowering my Vyvanse from 60 mg all the way to 40 mg for the time being.
Also, I think CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is… useful, in a sense.
But it is not the be-all-end-all of therapy.
I think that it mainly works for allistics (specifically, neurodivergent people who are allistic, which means “non-Autistic”).
Currently, I am looking into other therapy modalities, such as ACT and OT.
I somewhat agree with this. However, I still think some stimulant is necessary in my case.
Same tbh. Would get nothing done otherwise.
That said, I am lowering my Vyvanse from 60 mg all the way to 40 mg for the time being.
Luckily for me, i can take the lowest dosage of Dexamfetamines (5mg) and 300mg bupropion with no tolerance increase over time on both.
Also, I think CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is… useful, in a sense. But it is not the be-all-end-all of therapy.
I wouldn’t know, really. My therapists have been very lacklustre and it just felt like a venting session and none of them had any clue what my issue could even be. This article has done more for me than years of therapy.
I think that it mainly works for allistics (specifically, neurodivergent people who are allistic, which means “non-Autistic”).
I could see that. I am AuDHD so maybe that is what made it hard for them to help me somehow.
I wouldn’t know, really. My therapists have been very lacklustre and it just felt like a venting session and none of them had any clue what my issue could even be. This article has done more for me than years of therapy.
S A M E
But also, in my case, I experienced therapy abuse several times with the therapists I had.
I have had 11 therapists so far since the year 2021.
I have switched therapists constantly.
Even the eighth therapist, who was better than the other therapists before her, abused me at one point, but I stuck with her because I was afraid of the next therapist being worse and maybe this one was as good as I could get, you know?
I am glad that she eventually terminated the client relationship due to the on-and-off-again no-shows, especially when I last had a job.
I found therapist later with PhD which is… honestly a godsend in this day and age and she is also an ADHDer.
However, she had to direct me to another therapist (my current talk therapist) because the practice that my current therapist works for specializes in neurodivergent clients as well as trans clients and also religious trauma too. She felt they might have more resources and had other things to attend to. I was glad she was at least very honest about it.
I also have a therapist now for ERP.
I always avoided ERP because I thought I could “tough it out.”
Now I don’t care whether I can or can’t.
I need to resolve my OCD pronto.
Oh, and my eighth therapist that I mentioned told me that I don’t have OCD (even when I was really interested at the time in either doing ERP or finding ways to ameliorate or see if I can reverse it in any way lol).
She kept doing CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy with me, just like all the other talk therapists that I have had here in Virginia.
When I would ask her for techniques on how to calm down or regulate my nervous system or some sort of mental technique that I could follow along to soothe my anxious thoughts, she would be like “Just keep questioning or giving a different point-of-view to your thoughts” or “We can get to that next week” or something like that.
Honestly, I am glad that I do box-breathing now lol
I was literally just asking for stuff like that, you know?
She would just give me those blank stares (along with the stuff she would say above).
But yeah lol I am glad I have my current talk therapist and my ERP there for OCD.
But now I really don’t expect much from any therapist nowadays.
If I get a good or great one in Zaragoza, when I get there, that would be awesome but that would probably be more of a lucky incident in my part, nothing more.
It’s like finding a block in Super Mario Bros. that gives you a mushroom that makes you big or whatever; you’re kinda just lucky to chance upon it, especially when you need it lol
Oh, and I am also AuDHD.
Oh wow, i have never been abused by a therapist. Can’t imagine to have that happen and then still have to try to trust other therapists! Your current situations sounds better though, thank fuck for that.
I “luckily” only ever had incompetent therapists that told me that i should maybe light a candle or straight up never figured out anything that could be wrong in my head or how to help it.
Maybe my problem is that i am in the netherlands and they truly don’t care about mental health here it seems.
Sorry my bad, I can yap a lot sometimes, I’m trying to do that less LMAO @DonLongSchlong@lemmygrad.ml
And maybe burnout and possibly over-stimulation, yeah.
Check if you’re also Autistic because that would explain the sensitivity issues.
I hope you all have a nice week :D
You too Oppo!
You too Oppo!
You too Oppo!! 🫂
you too oppo!!!
You too Oppo
snakes on a plane
Hope this works but eh whatever it’s fine now 🙂↔️
You too Oppo! ₍ᐢ…ᐢ₎♡
la gata
…uh hi ;_;
I wish I could stop drinking cow’s milk.
Time to drink goat milk like a true champ.
Goat gang rise up
Shout out to my High School Sociology teacher who started my radicalization process by teaching me that neoliberalism started with Pinochet. 🫡
My Apache history teacher on Native American History was great!
Really radicalized me!
I can only imagine the shock of learning Native American History.
I’m not even USian, but I was genuinely horrified after learning its history by the Communist perspective.
Like damn, I thought that it was a regular country with a rough economy, but it is literally unredeemable from its inception to today.
On a more positive note, Native American’s endurance is also inspiring. Hope I can meet one one day. May Turtle Island be free someday.
There was a lot of sympathy for Indigenous folks growing up in my classrooms. But also lots of racism among students (among all races, mind you; “race jokes” or racist jokes were also very rife). I think we just kinda had more sympathy for Indigenous folks though. But I feel that it was also borne out of some misconceptions and a sense of “pity” or whatever you call it; but the Indigenous definitely suffered alright and the U.S.'s policies to them are still genocidal to this day.
It also helped that we have a few Indigenous teachers even in grade school (elementary to high school).
The history on Indigenous history on the Americas (with a focus on the United States in particular) was very useful to me.
I had it in college. Honestly, I remember it well. It was arguably the first class that was truly kinda formative to me intellectually-speaking.
But honestly?
My schooling years sucked.
Evangelical principal that allowed sexual abuse to happen while he looked the other way (this was in my high school); constantly being sent to special ed classes; being almost killed and threatened by a racist who later joined the National Guard; rampant racist bullying in general; teachers allowing racist discourse, etc.
That sucks. Here in Brazil there was a lot of shit that happened against the Indigenous people, but it was mostly concentrated on the coastline up to the 1940s and there isn’t a lot of cultural bias towards genocide ( some massacres unfortunately happened and nobody got punished).
Still, the “pity” exists here as well. It’s hard to describe it.
Also, I hope you got some peace after school.
Never happened.
Still hasn’t.
I was abused after my narcissistic father left around 2020 by another group of people for almost five years or thereabouts.
My siblings are still loyal and visit my father.
One of them is literally a fascist and takes after his father.
I am leaving the country soon and away from my family so that’s good at least.
Comrade, I’m sorry that you’ve suffered so much. I’m also happy that you’re able to get away from them. You will get your peace, that I’m sure.
Thank you!
I hope comrade @rainpizza@lemmygrad.ml is doing well on their break.
Glad he took a break, they were covering the US war on Iran restlessly.
Yeah it can get tiresome and it’s best to intervene before you suffer burnout.
Oh, what happened
Just real life stuff, they didn’t specify.
gotcha
We had 1222 extra deaths in Belgium during the heatwave last week and a half
Yikes. add their names to the Victims of Capitalism Memorial Wall.
huh??? whats capitalism gotta do with climate change???
Who do you think bankrolled 50 years of climate change denial?
im pretty sure they r joking 😭
The wall in question. Not to scale.
Depression is fucking with me lately more so than usual and then I’ll casually run into other people online who are also western and who seem to have an even worse situation and mental state than I do. Not that it’s a competition, but like, I guess this is what decline looks like. I do not remember it seeming this bad even during the height of the pandemic, but maybe I was in different circles or I’m remembering it as less bad than it was. Either way, it certainly doesn’t seem to have improved since then.
It’s not random discontent, too. Like a repeating theme I see, is someone’s home situation is shitty and/or their job. Sometimes their health is doing poorly too, physical, mental, or both. Or other people they live with have suffering health and that’s part of the problem.
Meanwhile, in the US they’re making the poor people healthcare more means tested. And this in an already hyper individualist, hyper divided “society”. I keep wondering when “in decline” transitions to “powder keg”. Not like I want it to be one, but this shit ain’t sustainable.
Sometimes I wonder if I “have depression” or if I “am depressed” because that is the natural response to the situation. Maybe the people who aren’t depressed are just not really aware of what is going on around them, or they are high on other drugs.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with you. Also happy cake day.
Sometimes I wonder if I “have depression” or if I “am depressed” because that is the natural response to the situation. Maybe the people who aren’t depressed are just not really aware of what is going on around them, or they are high on other drugs.
Hard to say since there are surely a lot of people who are “self medicating” with one thing or another. It reminds of this Marshall Rosenberg guy who was big into this idea of unmet needs causing a lot of problems, including depression. I don’t think he knew about the “chemical imbalance” kind of depression, the research on that may have come after, but anyway, it really stuck with me thinking about unmet needs. Even though in retrospect, I think his worldview was severely lacking some dialectical and historical materialism, I do believe he had a point about unmet needs causing a lot of problems; he just wasn’t going far enough into why people rampantly had unmet needs to begin with.
Also happy cake day.
Thanks. It’s a bit funny to me that it occurs on the 4th of July. I’m pretty sure the reason for that was me feeling alone among people who were sincerely celebrating the 4th and so seeking this place out.
Well Morocco rightfully won against The Netherlands and lo and behold apart from a single incident maybe no mass riots broke out. Who would’ve thought? Right wingers absolutely seething right now grasping whatever straws they have left.
After the game I joined the celebrations and nothing happened. I heard a lot of honking and saw people with Moroccan flags, but other than some fireworks here and now it was calm. I wore an orange shirt and nobody cared. I did see a lot of police, which was very excessive. Some of then were covering their faces and when I asked one of them about it, he just said he didn’t want to be recognized. I asked him to clarify why he didn’t want to be recognized but he wouldn’t. On the internet I saw videos of Dutch police beating up Moroccan fans. Maybe the police are the true rioters.
Prior to the loss, I was watching in a bar, and there were Dutch and Moroccan fans watching together without any problems. One Moroccan in a Morocco jersey said he didn’t really care that much who won.
I loved Morocco while I was there.
The country was fucking gorgeous ngl
I’m sorry chat but this raises huge questions and implications
this makes me laugh every time i see it. it reminds me of the “bro i guess” image.
and then he turned into a pickle
funniest shit i’ve ever seen
…okay, i don’t know why, something about your comment reminded me of that unfunny meme lol 😂
coming back to say i enjoy how the red pen says “Ok???” there’s so many ways you can interpret that, i choose “teacher is so broken in spirit already and got to that sentence and saw a glimmer of promise and was just going to try to throw a dog a bone”
other gems: ‘also, gross.’ ‘cool as fuck’ / ‘horrible opening’ ‘stomp a turty’ the What in the corner without a question mark the second perchance
On RevLeft there used to be a regular called ‘pileofdeadnazis’, and unforgetting that made me realize… I simply don’t have the sincere, visceral hatred for militant anticommunists that I once had. They’re still nuisances, of course, but I don’t feel that same emotionally draining hatred for them anymore. I remember nine years ago feeling a macabre sense of satisfaction in seeing photographs of Fascist corpses, but now I feel barely anything at all. It’s mostly the same indifference when I play Zombie Army Trilogy (save for a few slow-motion death sequences): it feels less like sweet revenge and more like another job that needs getting done.
I feel like I should despise militant anticommunists more than I do, but I don’t. Even hearing about an IOF war criminal committing (say) child abuse doesn’t make me think something along the lines of ‘I want to fucking strangle these pukestains’ but more along the lines of ‘hmmf, typical.’ I don’t know if it’s my depression or naturally mellowing out or what, but it is a shift that I’ve noticed; I am almost nostalgic for the times when I was angrier.
i dont condemn anger and it annoys me when people, especially libs, do, but it’s fine to not feel as intensely and emotionally, cuz i mean, your thoughts don’t define any merit you have, only what you do. don’t worry too hard about what you’re feeling and why.
also, if holding onto rage without an outlet for a while just causes you problems, it’s fine to let it go, not because you’re wrong for feeling angry, but because it’s always better to be kind to yourself, and letting yourself save that rage for when you can do something with it is always smarter than letting it fester and corrode yourself. not saying rage is bad in and of itself, once again, just trying to say that rage can consume you, and you’re a nice person, and your rage should be directed at those who are evil like, you know, IOF soldiers and fascists as you said, but if it’s just cooped up in you and it hurts and you also can’t act on it at the moment, it diminishing is okay.
if you’re checking yourself when you’re alone for feeling the ‘right’ feelings in the face of great tragedies, and berating yourself for not feeling those ‘right’ feelings, that’s, pardon my words, silly (this is meant to be comforting, i’m just no good at it) you’re not a jerk for not feeling the ‘right’ way! don’t stress about having the ‘right’ feelings if your behavior has not worsened. the only reason becoming dispassionate would be bad would be if your actions started to break away and act contrary to your principles.
sorry i guess my thesis was don’t worry and don’t feel guilty about not feeling like you used to. you don’t know if that’ll change, and even if it does, if you stay principled and cognitive, then it doesn’t matter. i think (not very good at speaking).
Honestly?
You’re protecting your sanity.
Especially in this world.
Its probably better to be a little dispassionate about it. Supposing the revolution happens, I imagine that if the situation calls for the eradication of fascists and you went into it all fired up it would probably burn you out faster than if you went into it thinking it was a chore that needed to be done.
Feelings come and go. I’m pretty sure I’d break down if I felt boiling rage every time I read about another atrocity committed by the empire today, or in the past. But I know that I care. I can’t read about it without feeling something. Persistent strong feelings though, I don’t think are really sustainable as an ongoing thing. The reverse example of your hatred situation being how people in long-term relationships will shift over time from super strong lovey dovey feelings to more of a sustained, nurtured affection, or even “fall out of love”.
Impermanence is a defining part of our existence, as is (in the dialectical materialist view) things changing form via transition and negation and so on.
So I guess what I’m getting at is, it makes sense that you would not stay in a state of super visceral hatred forever. And the beliefs you have, and knowledge you possess about fascists, will still be there in moments of immediate crisis (like the type of moments when fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode kicks in). So in those moments, especially if you are more rested, I’m sure the feelings will return in one way or another as they are needed. Conserving and managing our energy does matter and you don’t have to prove you’re a real fash hater by feeling hatred for them constantly or whatever.
Hate in general is one of those things where I can see the purpose of it in dealing with truly atrocious systems and behavior, like with righteous anger, but it doesn’t need to define us for it to serve a purpose. And, in fact, when it is defining us, is it even worth it? I think we deserve better than to be defined by hate. It is, after all, a great protective love that can motivate righteous anger in the first place. And to be clear, I don’t mean this in some “you will be corrupted by hate” kind of way, more like, about what is a sustainable and humane way for us to live. We need people who can carry the fight through. Martyrs can’t give marching orders.
There is way too many Johnny Harris-ish CIA youtubers out there, i just saw one talking about the DPRK and they frame it the most CIA way possible.
Like, actually in the Company?
Or “ex-CIA”?
That last one basically means you’re still in it lol 😅😅
As the saying goes in regards to CIA and “ex-CIA” types:
“You never really leave the Company.”
