Oh, shit. Well I'm glad that I mentioned that last part then because I almost didn't do it. I hope it turns out to be useful advice for you!

I don't disagree with what you've said here entirely. Capitalism absolutely aggravates mental illness and it produces conditions that generate mental ill health.

But ascertaining the correct etiology of a condition doesn't necessarily have an impact on the treatment. Say a person is experiencing liver failure due to alcoholism. The cause is alcoholism, the condition is liver failure, and yet the treatment remains the same whether or not it was alcoholism that brought about the condition.

In the same way, we can attribute much of psychiatric disorders to capitalism but, at least for the individual, the treatment remains the same.

I think we need to be cautious to avoid a puritanical attitude towards psychiatric meds. I could write a book based on my criticisms of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry and how they operate, however at the same time we shouldn't discourage people from the appropriate use of medications to improve their wellbeing regardless of how ruthless and exploitative the pharmaceutical industry itself is. The system is going to be fucked whether or not someone has an appropriate medication regime for their mental health. The only difference is that one option means an improved quality of life.

It's also important to keep in mind though that there are certain mental illnesses that do require an ongoing medication regime for maintenance and that this would persist under socialism. Schizophrenia and bipolar are two very obvious examples here. Even under fully automated luxury gay space communism, the overwhelming majority of cases of bipolar and schizophrenia are going to require ongoing medication regimes.

Unsolicited advice incoming but you rightfully put a lot of emphasis on the emotional dysregulation aspect of ADHD, which gets chronically overlooked.

Personally I have found that clonidine works really well for my experience of emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity. It's a boring medication - typically it's just used for lowering blood pressure and it's quite safe and generally well tolerated. (Obviously stimulant medications increase your BP so taking something that reduces your BP as a side effect is actually beneficial in the long term.)

It might be something that is worth looking into for yourself given what you wrote here.

As a sidebar, I also experience PTSD and clonidine helps with managing my trauma response. One perk of the medication is that it's fast acting and you don't get major withdrawals from it so if I had a ton of trauma nightmares the night before or if I'm struggling with PTSD symptoms during the day for whatever reason, I can just increase my dose as needed on that particular day and it helps keep things manageable for me.

There needs to be further research on this but ADHD occurs in autistic people at an approximate rate of somewhere between 20-40%.

There's very little out there about autism or ADHD for adults and almost nothing about comorbid autism and ADHD in adults.

Speaking anecdotally as someone who is autistic and an ADHDer, I fit into neither the ADHD nor the autism categories neatly. My ADHD traits often counterbalance my autistic traits and, likewise, my autistic traits often counterbalance my ADHD traits. (At least when they aren't ganging up on me.) It's very complex.

I'd call BE an eclectic Marxist tbh.

He definitely holds his fair share of ultra positions but he's not actually an ultra; he mentioned that he considered Stalin to be 50/50 good/bad and Mao to be 70/30. An ultra wouldn't say anything like that (despite my objections that those names at the least need to be swapped around; not to start a struggle session but Stalin made a lot of choices that were either under duress or the best of a bad set of options while Mao made some major fuckups all by himself, although I think both figures need higher ratings tbh.)

One thing that wasn't mentioned in that post is that BE denied the fact that BA415 faced any credible threat because he wasn't at risk of being killed after being doxed.

For one thing, I believe it was France that had its demographic data used to aid in identifying the people who were put into concentration camps and/or exterminated; just because your personal information is safe today under the current regime is no assurance that your personal information won't be used against you tomorrow under different circumstances.

Another thing is that this is just completely false. It's not a stretch to imagine that he might have been swatted and that during the swatting he could have gotten killed, either through typical Yankee cop negligence or by something more malicious and planned.

Last of all, being doxed can pose a significant threat to your safety and wellbeing without credible threats to your life. Just because nobody is coming around to your address to put a bullet in your head doesn't mean that they aren't ordering a barrage of pizzas at all times of the night, that people can't threaten, intimidate, or harass you, that they can't interfere with your job, that they can't get you fired, evicted, or brought up on false charges etc.

I'd love to get BE to respond on stream to a question about why he keeps his identity and residence away from public knowledge because he'd immediately give half a dozen reasons why this is the case without needing a moment to think about it. It would really undermine this shitty hot take of his.

Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

This is the point where, if I was an organiser in the UK, I would start pushing really hard for raising awareness about how the watermelon is symbolic of support for Palestine and I'd start organising watermelon-based protests, including the strategic deployment of watermelons left at the entrances to Zionist organisations.

If they want to push demonstrations for Palestine underground, so be it. Getting arrested as a prisoner of conscience in the UK isn't going to serve the interests of Palestinians.

But imagine how fragile and absurd the Zionists would look if they tried to suppress the celebration of watermelons and public watermelon eating events or if people started getting brought up on terrorism charges for "accidentally" leaving a shopping bag with a watermelon on the steps of buildings.

Not only would judges be virtually forced to throw out any charges laid against people for this stuff but it would be an absolute media coup to have big Zionist organisations playing victim by cowering in terror at a watermelon left on their steps.

according to your biological sex

Okay, cool but I've never undergone scientific testing to establish my biological sex so I guess I should just stick to being non-binary to avoid this dangerous trap? Pls advise.

To be fair, I'm not sure that there's a whole lot that you'd be able to do to that car with a hammer that this driver hadn't already done themselves.

Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you're in that 16-25yo bracket.

With that in mind and from what you've said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)

It's just a wild hunch so I'm not going to go into the why of it but it's just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.

Ah, I found it!

It's called "Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology”

I haven't read it so I can't promise anything but it might be a good place to start at the least.

So a lot of this is going to be contextual - how important the friendship is, how deep he has gone into the manosphere, how long he's been in it etc.

I'm going to approach this from the assumption that it's a long-game situation and that you care about the person deeply. Pretty much everything applies from this but whether you choose to maintain the friendship or whether you decide to end the friendship or you aren't willing to invest as much into this project as it demands is your prerogative.

Basically in a long-game situation your primary concern will be to always maintain the relationship and lines of communication. If you don't have those two fundamental factors, you will be unable to effect any change.

What this means is that you will almost certainly need to be judicious in what you choose to push back on and when you decide to do it. What this looks like, in practice, is letting things slide by if they do not serve your overall goals. I'm not saying that you have to tacitly or even implicitly support their opinions but if you are skilful about it you can make asides to voice dissent without dragging something down into a debate. Throwaway lines like "I don't really see it that way" or "That doesn't track with my experience" before carrying on the conversation are going to be important here.

Your friend has almost certainly taken the trauma of a breakup and turned it into manosphere bullshit. What this means is he likely feels lost, powerless, abandoned, disillusioned etc. and the manosphere narratives are assuaging these underlying feelings. You will need to approach your interactions with him in a way that does not threaten him or aggravate these feelings of powerlessness etc. because if you position yourself as a threat to the beliefs which give him a sense of security and power then you will aggravate the underlying causes for him falling to the manosphere and you will almost certainly make him dig deeper into the manosphere as a way of bolstering himself.

You will need to walk the tightrope of being a friend to him while not being an ally to his beliefs. You will have to demonstrate that you will not abandon him and that you are not going to force him into positions where he feels powerless. But at the same time, you cannot endorse his beliefs and you will need to get him to trust you enough that he expresses these opinions to you and then to trust you enough to let you explore these opinions in regards to validity, consequences, implications etc.

This is where the real work takes place. You need to be delicate and engaged while also holding a position of detachment - if you treat these discussions where you explore his beliefs from an antagonistic angle or where you are heavily invested in it emotionally, it's going to result in arguments and shutting down and similar counterproductive outcomes.

Essentially, you want to get him to move from a totalising narrative such as "All women are b*tches" to something which has nuance, even if it isn't a complete reversal. This might mean that when he says something like this and you have decided that it's appropriate to challenge it in that moment, you could reflect that he doesn't treat his mom/sister/etc. as if that statement is true. Then you want to explore this apparent contradiction and use dialogue to open up space to compare, reflect, challenge, and further explore.

If, over time, he moves from "All women are b*tches" to something like "Most women are..." or "Women can be..." then that's progress, even if it doesn't feel that way.

Keep on chipping away at these values by exploring them, gently countering them (especially with real-world examples), and ultimately getting him to question the narratives himself.

It's kinda hard to give a clear procedural roadmap to how you would go about challenging someone's beliefs because it's all so contextual but I hope this is a starting point for you. And I just want to give you a caution that if you approach interactions with your friend from the position of "I'm right and he's wrong, he needs to learn from me so that he can see my point of view and why I'm right", you're never going to make progress. You have to be humble, open, curious, and most of all gentle.

Good luck with it.

There was an academic work mentioned in a recent Cosmopod episode Between the Market and the Plan. It was a very brief mention in regards to the shifting sexual mores in the USSR.

Unfortunately the title of the work wasn't very descriptive nor catchy so I can't recall it now. And of course the episode is 3 hours long. I'll try to dig up the reference and get back to you about it.

Just to contribute to this point with something to reflect upon:

During the (laughably titled) "Red Vienna" era, when SocDems ran the city, the government built high quality housing blocks for the working people, which would house one tenth of the city's entire population.

Rent in these blocks was around 4% of a working class income.

Are you pulling in more cash than a Viennese worker in the 1932, dollar-for-dollar (adjusted)? Probably.

Are you spending somewhere from 25-75% of your income on housing alone, making you effectively worse off than that Viennese worker in 1932? Again, probably.

When you crunch the rawest of numbers you can get some really skewed ideas about what the reality is. Statistics lie.

Here are some good podcast episodes from Actually Existing Socialism that cover the GDR if you want a bit of an introduction:

East Germany: Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? w/Bruni de la Motte

The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 1) w/ Victor Grossman

The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 2) w/ Victor Grossman

What Has Socialism Ever Done For Women? w/ Julia Mead (This is a bit more tangential)

Writings available from the authors here:

Stasi State Or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and what Became of it by Bruni De la Motte and John Green

Victor Grossman's autobiographies

What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women? Reflections on Women’s Emancipation in the Eastern Bloc by Julia Mead and Kristen Ghodsee

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen Ghodsee

Okay, for note-taking I think there are a few critical things to do:

1. Write down explanations of terms/names which you don't implicitly understand the meaning of. Lenin is dragging Kautsky but you don't know why or what Kautsky represented? Cool. Figure it out via Wikipedia, searching r*ddit, making a question here or on Hexbear about it etc. and write a summary of what "Kautsky" symbolises.

2. Write down questions and assumptions as they come up. "SPD will later betray the KPD" or "How does the SPD rationalise their collaboration with the Nazis? Is Thällman right about 'social fascism'?"

3. Highlight key points and takeaways from the text. Stuff like interesting quotes, important details, the key learnings etc. All the stuff that you would put into a summary of the book if you needed to, basically.

4. You don't have to do this in the book itself. You might want to write things down on a notepad or type it up in a word document. Depending on how in-depth you're going, you may want to even go so far as to make it into something resembling a draft of an essay. Note that the very exercise of writing things out will reinforce your learning process so it doesn't even need to be a permanent document tbh.

I'm also in favour of going ham on annotating books because what use is a book if it goes unused?

The purpose of a book is to be read and to be used as a tool for learning, so use it as it's been designed.

My caveat here would be for books which are first editions or extremely rare ones but that aside, use it as you will.

If you still don't feel comfortable with that then you can use a pencil so that your annotations are erasable or you can buy sticky inserts that are transparent overlays which you can use to write onto which doesn't cause any permanent impact on the book itself.

As for how you take notes, it depends on what your purpose is. I'm going to chew on this question and respond to it in another reply once I've mustered the brainpower.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That's really rough.

I'm sorry but I really can't think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

Unionise, organise, agitate, educate. Same as it has always been.

We are helpless alone but together we are strong.

You might consider learning a second language and getting tf out of the dumpsterfire that is the US preemptively though. Vietnam pays good cash for people who do english tutoring for businesspeople. Maybe you can do that "digital nomad" (*shudders*) thing too.

I'm really white so I don't have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It's an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It's no self-help book and it won't be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you're experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

Add "no bosses" to that list too.

Y'all think that any sort of construction or manufacturing is going to run in a self-organised fashion without foremen? Lol, good luck.

If you've never worked in a factory before, that's cool but there are much better ways of announcing this fact and I think that it's important to remember the old "No investigation, no right to speak" or, in their terms "In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker".

I try not to focus too much on these types because I'm convinced that a couple of years of touching grass, working for a living, and spending time doing on the ground organising will bring these infantile urges in people to a conclusion in all but the most stubborn-minded. Although you can cut through these naive ideological positions by tracing out how there was (vulgar) vanguardism in their favourite historical socialist projects and how leadership was crucial to their functioning. That being said I have more important things to do with my time than engaging people with discussions on that stuff tbh.

Yeah, more broadly the western left is in shambles but to see how (comparatively) rapidly it's shaping up gives me hope.

This could be representative of the circles I've moved in with my own political journey but MLism wasn't even on the table. Heck, being a revolutionary wasn't really either. If you look at, say, the anti-globalisation protests and the anti-war movement(s) around the bush era the left was mostly what I'd characterise as being extremely progressive. There was a time when Naomi Klein was extremely influential on this cohort.

Nowadays Klein isn't a name I see brought up in the left except for the very rare mention of her underrated documentary The Take because the left is much more radical now than she is.

There was a time where the compatible left was the left and it didn't have to go around proclaiming that Marxism-Leninism is a "dead ideology" which, if you look at it from the perspective of Implicature or you're a bit Hegelian about it, it's pretty obvious that if Marxism-Leninism really was dead then nobody would need to proclaim this fact because:

a) It would be self-evident; nobody needs to proclaim that Manichaeism is dead because it's already true

b) It would be irrelevant to say as much since it is already dead; I'd venture that most people haven't got a clue what Manichaeism even is because Manichaeism truly is dead

The opposite is true for Marxism-Leninism.

Nowadays there's a couple of major splits within the radical and circa-radical left, as I see it:

1. There's the essentially silent movement where people log off, touch grass, and are dedicated to organising in their communities. This isn't really seen unless you're embedded in an org or an online circle where you know people in it and you see them check out of their online presence in favour of on the ground work. But it's certainly happening although because this shift is predicated upon not announcing it online and not constantly touting it on social media it is largely invisible.

2. There's the radical left vs the compatible left split. This is where you see one side sheepdogging everyone to vote for the Dems and denouncing tankies as "ruining the left for everyone else" etc. vs the people who are capable of critiquing the progressive left and doing self-crit on the actual left who engage in materialist analysis and serve as the spectre haunting the internet because they are more organised, generally much better informed and more well-versed in theory etc.

The fact that Marxism-Leninism is on the rise is no accident. People have seen the failures of movements like Occupy and the CHAZ and they've learned from them. The material conditions have rapidly changed over the past two decades and I'd argue that this has a significant impact on people's ideological positions. Your political development arc mirrors that of a lot of people who are now communist too.

If you take PatSocs, as an example, this was essentially a line struggle that developed in the broader western left. I'd say that it's pretty much dead in the water now, thankfully. But there was a split in the ideological positions and the western left hashed out its position on regressive nationalism extremely rapidly. This is characteristic of a vital movement that is thriving and honing itself and that alone is worth celebrating because it means that not only is there enough people in a movement to cause a split(!!) but the movement is developing and it will continue to do so with future splits too.

To go from "Oh no, we must be conscious consumers and stop supporting sweatshops with our hard earned cash!!" to "Let's set up camp outside Wall Street and... idk but we'll figure out the rest later lol" to "We are going to read Marx and Lenin and we're going to seize the state by force" is a very promising development arc.

Apparently this is Peterson's third attempt at establishing a "university"

You are going to keep on encountering this as you read up on theory and history.

Try not to be too down on yourself when it happens because you shouldn't expect yourself to be completely across the most important topics of political debate in Europe from nearly two centuries ago.

Imagine a person in a century from now reading articles from, say, The Guardian and coming across something which references "Trumpism" or "the MAGA movement" to critique it; that person almost certainly isn't going to understand what the MAGA movement refers to but the Guardian article is going to treat it as if everyone grasps what they're referring to because the Guardian is part of a contemporary discussion right in this very moment where it's topical and relevant and so of course everyone grasps what it means today but this will not be the case in a hundred year's time.

I'd recommend one of two approaches here:

Either skip over these sorts of terms because the fact that they don't mean anything to you may be indicative of the fact that they are no longer relevant to contemporary politics (for example, you don't hear people talking about Manichaeism or Fabianism today because it bears no relevance to today's politics) or to put a little note next to the name with a shorthand version of what that person's thought represents (for example, when reading Lenin lambast Bernstein you might put a little note saying "incremental reformism under bourgeois democracy to achieve socialism" so that whenever you encounter Lenin striking out against Bernsteinism then you can know what he's really criticising when he does it.)

It will make more sense as you read more theory. Good luck with it!

I'd recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it's quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It's very nutritious too.

Basically, if you're going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won't even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you've adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It's prole af.

When your ideology is primarily individualist and largely aesthetic, you end up with a ton of people who treat their political orientation as a fashion statement.

Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's a massive trend in anarchism to not be focused on the ideological distinctions between the plethora of anarchist subtypes but instead to align oneself to a flavour of anarchism which is most appealing.

In communist thought you have very clear distinctions which are based on theoretical and practical disagreements (practical in the sense of socialism being put into practice); you have leftcoms and Trotskyists and council communists and MLs and MLMs etc. All of whom you can trace out their positions and their ideological stances from.

In anarchism it's much more about what the individual is most attracted to as a cause than this. Sure there are platformists, DeLeonists, and egoists, for example, which fit what I've mentioned above about disagreements on theory and practice but you're more likely to find an anarcha-feminist or an eco-anarchist than you will a DeLeonist or a platformist imo.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise that so much of anarchism is focused on fashion.

Lol this ain't reddit, you don't need to couch requests for sources like that. I'm not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There's this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

So American-centric you'd think there's barely any other country besides the US

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There's so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It's idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It's absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson's was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson's exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the "white liberal" (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they'll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I'll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don't trust them, I don't like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

People have already covered the major authors so I'm going to give a shout out to Torkil Lauesen.

He had a good interview on RevLeft Radio and an okay one on The Deprogram if you want to get a feel for what he's like.

Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided

I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔

¡Venceremos!

Agreed.

It's stuff like this that makes me realise how much better a head of state Thomas Sankara was than I'll ever be though. Homie refused to use airconditioning in his office because it was considered a luxury in Burkina Faso.

I believe Suslov was another revolutionary figure who eschewed the privileges that he had access to on the grounds that if it was good enough for the masses then it's good enough for him.

NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.

Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you're duped or you're an op.

Oh, I forgot to mention something in my previous comment so please excuse the double-tap.

There's absolutely no reason why you have to focus your learning on the ongoing dark history of the US. It's still going to be there waiting for you whenever you're ready to come back to it.

If you feel like you're getting doompilled by staring long into that particular abyss then it is no longer serving you or the greater struggle. So abandon it, at least temporarily.

There are a ton of inspiring things from the past and the present moment that you can focus on so seek out those things and give yourself permission to put investigation into the stuff that brings you down on hold. Also, when you return to this stuff, remember that you need to be doing this with a sense of purpose. Mindless consumption of the doom doesn't work towards anything but if you are learning about this stuff to develop your thoughts about how to intervene in it and defend the revolution (e.g. learning about Salvador Allende's presidency and the coup in order to take lessons to heart which will inform your politics and how you would guard against subversions and coups) then it gives much more meaning to the difficult subject matter and it makes it less likely to sap your revolutionary spirit.

You might want to consider reducing your intake or disconnecting entirely from the news cycle as well. Of all the things I am exposed to, I find this brings me down like nothing else.

Try to find time for developing your aspirations and hopes as well as for your own leisure. I'm not of the opinion that self-care is a revolutionary act but it sure as hell is a radical act and it's of critical importance because you're not going to be of much use to communism, your community, your circle of loved ones, or yourself if you end up in a pit of endless despair.

You are far too important for that.

::: spoiler Israel has the right to exist ...in the dustbin of history :::

Thank you, robot.