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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I’m going to China tomorrow, which is pretty cool. (I’m also going to be in Russia for a while after that).
i rlly rlly rlly just hate having adhd
I know the feeling. It’s very exhausting, isn’t it.
yes, i have audhd, and while i can sort of recognize i dont have a lot of respect for my studies and what nonsense they push on me, i also get ticked off by how poorly i do at tasks, it’s really infuriating and also hard to articulate, also because for some classes i do have a love for them and should be doing better (love hate relationship with history given the sheer volume of nonsense i’m fed, just got the Katyn Massacre WAS Ussr in my book). thank you for empathizing :)
I’m thinking of dropping learning Arabic. It’s too hard to learn Arabic when have to learn both MSA and the dialect. And it’s hard learning the dialect because there aren’t that many resources and all news and writing is in MSA. How am I supposed to learn Palestinian Arabic through TV shows when subtitles are all in MSA? I’ve lost all motivation to learn the language. It’s sad, since I really like the culture and language
I think I’ll focus mainly on Chinese
I really like the idea behind the comprehensible input method. It’s basically guided immersion, and may be a good option. Lots of Arabic resources when you scroll down just a bit here: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Thank you. I’ll give Arabic another go. And that link is useful for other languages I’m learning as well
Nice! It’s a really interesting method. You almost can’t believe it’s taken people this long to come up with a guided immersion approach, but I’m here for it. :)
After the heat wave for the last days we now have floodings. Everything is fine though.
Probably good that you aren’t still walking.
Biblical
Honestly it’s genuinely shocking to me that only 8% of UK gdp is manufacturing. Not necessarily that UK manufacturing is particularly important, but just that it’s a country of 70 million people. Meanwhile Singapore has a fraction of the population and a land mass less than the size of London but yet 20% of its gdp comes from manufacturing.
Overall, the lack of uk manufacturing ability is actually shocking to me, not being from there. It doesn’t produce its own insulin, it doesnt have mass produced car brands, it doesn’t produce much of its rollingstock or their components, etc. Etc.
Britain’s entire economy revolves around London’s finance, outside there the nation is poorer than Mississippi IIRC. They’re part of managing the balance sheet of the imperial debt trap. They don’t do anything legit. That KDWalmsey guy was saying that Chinese firms might not even be able to profitably invest in European factories for the purposes of circumventing EV sanctions lol
Being in the imperial core, they outsource all the manufacturing
Wdym? They are among the top european manufacturers of quantitative financial analaysis spreadsheets. Only uncivilised countries (usually inhabitated by non-whites) produce material things - meanwhile my superior intellect has concluded that another $100 million should be invested into AI-datacenters, long live the UKKK!
Funny how the countries that make shit are called “developing” while the ones who actively deindustrialised are developed
Sometimes I think back to the very beginning of Covid and how it was, for me, a peaceful time. Everything slowed down, online gaming parties with friends were the only social activity you could do. Walking outside was so peaceful due to lack of cars and the few people that were outside were very friendly. It really felt like things were getting rough but at the same time as if thing were about to change in a positive way.
I think it lasted three, maybe four weeks and then everything went to shit permanently. For healthcare workers it went to shit right away. 25 thousand people died in The Netherlands (confirmed to be Covid, probably higher and some other people died due to the chaos surrounding covid). I think about that period from time to time. And it makes me sad.
The cars, man. It’s a much more lite version compared to the COVID days, but during holiday season when a lot of people are away and there’s less cars everywhere it’s so peaceful to be able to walk around the neighborhood and hear my own thoughts instead of constant traffic noises. At least for a few days it feels like I am not a second class citizen in a city built for cars. It’s so refreshing while it lasts.
Honestly the covid was the best year of my life. The government dumped a lot of free money on workers here. My partner and I basically got to live like we would if we were 4x as wealthy, and worked 1/4 as much. The grocery stores all started doing home delivery which is amazing for a person who doesn’t drive. We had just moved so we didn’t have any friends in the area anyway and we aren’t really social so we didn’t miss out on anything.
I was living in Florida at the time. I remember riding my bike home from work the day of the “shut down” and the only difference was cop cars just sitting around everywhere. Next day they were gone and nothing ever happened.
It was a total joke lmfao. No wonder I got COVID three times while living there.
I kinda relate on the feeling of it in the beginning. When things were shutting down, I don’t know if I’d say I was happier exactly but I got way more productive in a way that flies in the face of mentalities that would claim scare pressure is needed or people won’t do things. It felt like a lot of pressure I had on myself was temporarily lifted and I did like a draft of a novel, some game project. Idk, it’s a weird thing. I often feel like time is running out in one way or another, but for that brief period, it felt like I had time and I used it. Maybe some of it was the slowing down feel of things like you mention. I do tend to think the high speed internet / telecomm tech aspect of things has made people more angsty in relation to time, but the number of hours in the day hasn’t changed. The main difference is it’s easier to ping somebody instantly from anywhere and it’s easier to burn time with engrossing distractions like internet content.
According to some new polls our party reached nearly 18% of the votes in the French speaking part if there were to be elections today
Managed to avoid eviction. Lucked out and got the one landlord on Earth that isn’t a demonic hellspawn and actually has empathy for other people. I’ll have to pay more later and my finances are going to be shit for a while but at least I won’t be homeless.
Saw a guy I got a socialist/anti-fascist tattoo from posting online in support of Graham Platner.
I just can’t believe how after such a long and documented history of US subterfuge of the left, people will just fall for this guy so easily
Is he a veteran by any chance. Also re: username you know where else would be good to move to?? [Moving eyebrows up and down]
Is it common (I don’t know if weird is a good word to use) to be much more zen as a communist? I feel like ever since becoming an ML, I’m more relaxed and peaceful, and I’m a bit torn what that indicates.
Yankee here. I wouldn’t say it makes me more calm, but I also have chronic anxiety and had that before becoming ML. Being ML sharpens the clarity of where the real threats are, but it doesn’t make them any less real on its own. I think I was actually less anxious in a political capacity when I was liberal because I sort of trusted the system to work things out. Now I look at things like the mass murder done by it, the targeted assassinations, the slander, and so on, and it’s like, okay that’s a new kind of scary. It’s a bit like a Matrix type of thing in a place like the US. Waking up can make you seem like a threat to the system in ways that you weren’t before.
On the less fearful side, diamat is more grounding. It’s not all on you, it’s a fight that’s been going on for a long time, you don’t have to “just guess” and instead can look at the tactics and science others have used, etc.
But for me, that’s not enough to smooth over the understanding of how deeply depraved the empire is. It means unlearning a lot about how to deal with people and systems. There’s a Kwame Ture quote that goes something like, “In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The US has none.” It’s an unnerving thing to grapple with coming from a worldview that was something in the realm of liberal pacifism; that it’s basically junk and I have to learn a more militant way of being, along with the consequences that come from that.
When you’re a liberal you have no idea how anything works because you have no system of analysis. You might have a vague idea for why things are the way they are but you have no idea how to fix the problem because you don’t understand what causes it. This can be pretty stressful, particularly when you get to try your “solutions” and they don’t pan out. Also because you’re an individualist participating in bourgeois democracy will make you feel powerless when you fight hard for something but still lose because you didn’t have the pull you thought you did.
When you become a Marxist everything starts to click and make sense. You see the structures you couldn’t see before, understand why things are the way they are, and have a general idea of how to keep out of the situation because you can properly analyze what is happening. It also doesn’t feel like everything rests on you, specifically, because you’re no longer an individualist operating on Great Man Theory with a delusion that you’ll be one of those Great Men (the liberal fetishism for voting is basically Great Man Theory). This relieves a lot of burdens on your psyche and make you more relaxed. If you’re still stressed it’s probably due to something else like having no revolutionary movement to join, being poor and struggling, etc.
Whenever someone says that “becoming a leftist” made them more freaked out that’s a non-bookreader right there & if you have the energy, give them alms, o give them alms
When you realize nearly all the ills of the world boil down to one thing it really does take a lot of pressure off.
One of the funniest things to come out of the refugee crisis in Europe is that in The Netherlands there is a documentary about people fleeing to Paraguay to escape the system (and migrants, in their own words) only for them to end up living in Dutch circles in Paraguay refusing to adapt to the locals. If it were satire it would be too much, but it is reality.
The euroid heard yearns for colonia dignidad
It really shows how there’s still a huge coloniser’s mindset in Dutch people
Every day I feel less like liking football on the highest level and instead just want to support some local teams. The English champions are presented like some sort of magical thing but meanwhile they spend 1.3 billion euro to acquire a team to become champions. They will face what is effectively the sports branch of an oil state in the European final. Stats run the game now instead of wanting to play nice football and if I hear one more person saying xG I will become violent.
i can’t be the only one that thinks football has become boring, teams are run like finance portfolios, players don’t take risks and managers play to not lose, it’s a perfect example of the enshittification of stuff.
Same, I’m also moving towards following women’s football more.
I really shouldn’t watch TV shows set in high school. It just triggers my bullying and exclusion trauma from back then.
The worst kind of person in the world seems to always write high school settings it really doesn’t reflect what I think the overall experience is for ppl at all and accentuates the worst traits which are mainly in rich kids. But idk everyone is already pretty rich in many suburbs so it becomes the enormously stuck up McMansion fucks you would never wanna interact with anyways?? YMMV, if possible don’t go to high school, wait we don’t have to we’re adults, thank god
I had good times in high school, but still that type of media just makes me feel bad because life just got a lot shittier after.
how’s everyone? it’s been a while since I posted here. ans recently went to Spain Madrid and Barcelona on a work trip.
I’m so fucjing tired but ive been forced to actually develop a good flow at work & I feel less scared. Did you try any good new food
food is delicious. i missed plain rice. paella is great. bread is awesome. I ate some catalan food in Barcelona. Also had this
Shit it’s almost worth being in europe tjose are some marvelous plates you went off there
saw a palestine protest right in front of a world heritage center
Yesterday I was on the subway and I realized that the next station is given in French and Occitan. I’m happy to see that the language of my people has not yet been fully killed by France. If someone is curious, “next station” (or whatever you call it in English) is “estacion que vèn”, at least in the local dialect. I really want to learn our language but it’s already a miracle that I speak English.
That’s really nice to hear! Hopefully the Occitan language and identity will flourish. Southern France is so different from Northern France so it’s a shame that identity has been lost. It also irks me when people talk about French food like it’s a single cuisine, even though Occitan cuisine is more similar to Italian and Spanish food
