askchapo

Disclaimer: before you post anything ask yourself if you are going to dox yourself or someone else and if you are going to get anyone put on a higher priority watchlist than they're already on, yourself including. If the answer is yes, do not post it.

Some things are better talked about in an oblique way (and referencing Minecraft after the fact is about as useful in this regard as posting an image on Facebook saying that you do not consent to them using your personal information), some things are better off whispered in person, some things are better off not talked about at all. With that out the way...

What are some interesting things that you have come across?
What are you surprised about not being adopted more widely?

Shits getting real and it's worth having a discussion about what can make protests more effective. I'm talking group strategy, personal tactics, protective gear - anything really.

I don't know what I should do and this website is basically what goes for my social support system these days, so I'd like some advice please.

So I drive a very old car that until recently I didn't use much. It's from 2003 and it has less than 150k miles on it. It has a check engine light that I learned today comes from a tiny crack in the (a?) cylinder head gasket that's causing me to lose coolant. They quoted me 3-4k USD to replace it.

If they said 2k I might have been able to melt my debit and credit cards at the same time MAYBE. But 4k I need a loan for.

It's possible that this place is just a ripoff. I'm partially just talking this out right now so I should really get on the phone and find out if I can find something that won't break me.

Part of why it seems like it might be a ripoff is that I can find the parts (according to my completely uneducated and untrained figuring) on autozone.com for like 250 bucks. Maybe I can just do it myself? Maybe my landlord has tools? Or I can rent some maybe?

The guy at the car doctor said that if I wasn't going to do the repair I should probably trade it in sooner than later while it still holds value. Down this path I might really start crying about needing an adult though. A whole branching tree of decisions to make afterwards.

And to bring up an added complication: part of why I don't have a solid chuck of the downpayment of a house on hand to deal with this is that I was semi-homeless up until three months ago (friday is the anniversary). A downstream complication to that is that I never received my auto registration renewal from the state of CA. And by the time I realized it was a thing I should have had to deal with already, my shit expired. I'm pretty sure they're going to make me do a smog check which requires that I don't have an engine light on. So it's extra fucked to be driving with it right now. Oh and my insurance dropped me over a dispute over late charges I refuse to pay because they didn't tell me I owed them money and sent shit to the wrong address over and over.

So I guess an informal poll:

A: I shop around for a mechanic that's willing to fix my cars for the clothes off my back + fill up my credit card again ( T_T ) IF I CAN FIND ONE (and if not I guess take out a loan)

B: I buy the parts/find the tools and see if it's possible to do it myself, on like, a weekend.

C: I throw in the towel on my car and try to find a replacement somehow despite being broke enough to be here

D: Something I'm not thinking of.

I fucking hate this. I hate cars. I wish I could bike. I wish I could take transit. I hate having this single point of failure in my life that can completely sweep my still shaky legs out from under me, which I just now finally got up onto. I need advice because this decision could literally be the fucking end of the world for me. Yay.

edit: the specific car is a 2003 Suzuki Areio

I don't wanna have to listen to a Mattless episode to find out

looks like the nostalgia critic's even worse sibling (worse than his other already horrific sibling)

So @EmmaGoldman@hexbear.net had a nice comment here in a previous thread explaining the dynamic of Jewish people's attitude toward Israel.

I think everyone here understands that it is in Israel's benefit to (1) conflate antisemitism and antizionism to both silence dissent and (2) foster the perception that antisemitism is increasing, and even (3) encourage actual antisemitism/ally with antisemites so that Jews living in countries around the world feel under threat. Israel can then position itself as the final lifeboat for Jewish people to survive capitalism as it degrades into fascism that will almost certainly target them. Of course fleeing to Israel means becoming a settler-fascist yourself, but this is quite a tough choice to put in front of somebody and there are quite a few mental escape hatches one can use about working to change the system from within once you're there or whatever.

So the problem we face is this: Under the assumption that the support (enthusiastic or mere tolerance) of Jewish people in the US for Israel is important to maintaining US support for Israel, or at least for maintaining the veneer of legitimacy for this support, how can we convince people to give up their lifeboat? I think this is quite a large ask. Many of us here believe the imperial core is inevitably degrading into fascism under the repetitive two-step of overt slides to the right & neoliberalism slightly arresting this process but making people widely despise electoral politics. This fascism will target Jewish people, and the fascists are perfectly happy to have somewhere to ship Jewish people off to instead of killing them as they build their white ethnostate. Many other minorities will also be targeted but do not have the luxury of a similar lifeboat. How can we square this circle?

Obviously I've been hitting up LinkedIn, Indeed, and all that for remote jobs that fit my tech background. Also have been trying to get into nonprofit work as thats much more my speed, but here we are.

I've got about a month of unemployment left, and since getting let go in September, I've only had 3 interviews.

A few Hexbears have pointed me to this site for remote work:

https://www.dataannotation.tech/

But unfortunately, over a week after setting up my profile there, no work has been kicked my way.

Anything similar out there I can use to help myself out here?

Thanks comrades

I hear it used a lot in old USSR programs, in texts by Chinese marxists and even in old citations of Deng Xiaoping. Specifically per capita. What makes this the metric they reach for, instead of GDP, which is more famous.

Who wins?

• remove siding
• jack up house
• remove rotted material (rim joist and sill plate) and replace with pressure treated wood
• replace siding
• install subfloor (10 sq ft or so with some cutting)

High but not ultra high COL area

Can be anything from any source, movies, books, comics, video games, manga, anime etc.

Pic related is mine, the dragonslayer from berserk. I like it because it's simple. It's just a big fucking sword, no fancy bells and whistles like enchantments or spells.

Second runner-up is sting from lord of the rings, I like that it glows blue when orcs are around and it can be used in the dark as a light source.

I clowned a scratched lib recently for being french-canadian and proud of it, and that was pretty funny. But more recently someone else asked me about that incident a bit, and then she pretty much shilled for the French at me.

She said stuff like "well French canadians are a bit more complicated I guess... lots of them are metis or straight up native american" and "they had an alliance with them[indigenous peoples] and did marriages to strengthen it" ( ) and even "A lot of Acadians went to live with natives when colonies were disbanded by france". With a little bonus "Yes the French were really strong on defending Mi'kmaqs and saw them as the actual authority on the land" as a treat.

Now, I don't believe most of this nicey-nice pro-French shit for a second. But I sort of had to ask, how and why the hell were the French even there to start with? You rarely if ever hear about French colonists in North America; they still stole all the land like any settler-colonialists, right? Glancing at NATOpedia, I can see that Iroquois peoples were not overly happy at the french being there, which is about what I would expect. (although they did align with Dutch and English settlers themselves) The French government sent over "indentured servants" to their colony too, which, oof. Also

Enslaved men, women and children represented approximately 65 percent of the 6,000 non-indigenous population of Louisiana by the end of French rule.

Haiti pre-1791 moment. But funny enough, the NATOpedia article rarely makes mentions of any abuses of New France's indigenous populations, other than a bunch of wars with the Iroquois(started by Some Guy de Bastard murdering a few of their chiefs, it seems). That has to be a lie by ommission, right? Like

Modern historians have highlighted that despite largely functional relations with indigenous peoples, administrators in France viewed co-operation as a wholly irritating task. Geographically removed from the colonies, Parisian courtiers viewed indigenous peoples as 'sauvages', often criticising New French officials for even interacting with nations.

but mostly the NATOpedia article is about fucking fur traders, coureurs des bois, okay. Basically though the French populations of settlers shouldn't have any special consideration compared to Dutch or British settlers, right? Surely any european that shows up on north american shores, claims the land by alleged divine right and starts exploiting its resources is a bastard, yes?

E: sorry if I put my foot in my mouth anywhere

like in my head the four pillars of how you look are diet, exercise, skin care, and clothing/accessories. am i missing any big ones? also, where should i go for advice on how to improve on skin care and especially clothing? (i'm good on diet and exercise lol i used to see a nutritionist and she set me straight)

sorry if this is rambly and/or weird, im stoned off some weird european pseudo-weed

Death to America

I've been trying to go to the library and read more but I'm out of ideas for what to read next. Help plz.

Hello there, Hexbear! I am living in southern California at the moment, the south end of Los Angeles county to be more exact. I would love to help out and bring the local encampments for Palestine some coffee, food stuffs, water, whatever I can. I'm hoping for suggestions of where to look or how to contact organizers to find out what is most needed/wanted most! Accounts to follow or websites for how to best bring by donations! Thank you so much comrades!

Seems like the chain guide is stuck too close the frame now, when I'm in higher gear it stays on the first gear and moves fine but if I try and shift down I can hear the chain rubbing the chain guide.

Tried fiddling with the adjustment screws but that doesn't seem to be helping.

Idk if anyone has any advice on how to fix.

so my weeb ass is finally going to Japan. Main things me and my partner want to do are Ghlibi museum and theme park, see the life size Gundam, and go to a baseball game. We'll be mostly in Tokyo and Kyoto and then the Ghibli theme park in Nagoya. We like all the nerd shit so we'll be in Shibuya, Shinkuk and Akihabara, and maybe do some fancy stuff in Ginza.

videos, short books, etc. im looking for it as supplementary resources for other reading im doing, i don't need intricate histories of scholars just what the schools are, why they're different, how that manifested in politics

Genuinely curious. I keep thinking “it can’t get much worse without some kind of mass uprising” but the ability of the general population of Western states to just soak up suffering seems endless. Do you think we will actually see mass movements in the next decade or two? Or just slowly lurch into a void of ever-shittier liberalism?

By the West I mean like. Western Europe and the Anglosphere I guess.