askchapo

linux mint comes with a program coincidentally called Hexchat for connecting to IRC networks. Are these obsolete at this point, or are there still places to hang out with people so i dont have to use discord?

:kombucha-disgust: Last time I checked most pedos end up being hyper-religious conservatives or libertarians. Am I wrong?

Seems like chuds are projecting yet again. Imagine being the side of underage anime avatars and having the balls to accuse the left of "grooming"

So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.

Now here I am with opinions like "Stalin and the USSR weren't so bad" and "The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually". I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we've steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.

This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I'm generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.

How did I end up here? How did we..? I remember back on r/cth the line "This is enough to turn me into a tankie", or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.

I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.

I don't want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth's medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.

This isn't the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I'll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)

Since unsurprisingly the Redscare people are going fash, it would be good to know who's a grifter and who's not. What's your predictions?

My predictions:

Grifters:

1. Zizek
2. AOC
3. 1-2 from Cumtown (it's anyone's guess)

Not Grifters

1. The Deprogram Boys (ok I'm still in honeymoon)
2. Jezza (obviously)
3. Richard Wolfe & Harriet Fraad
4. Viki1999

The Soviet leadership at the time you go back to will absolutely follow through on your advice.

For me, I'd go back to say the early 60s and tell them to invest absolutely everything they can into computers, cybernetics, linear programming, etc; and using those tools for optimal central planning of the economy. Optimal both in the sense of economic efficiency and for greater democracy in the planning decisions. Get people to feel like they have a say in the economic plans and I think you short-circuit a lot of the consumerist drives. But ultimately, you just need that computing power to run a modern centrally planned economy.

I thought about telling them to make a Xi-like anti-corruption push in the 70s or so (and Andropov was working on that before he died). But I think if you get them to focus on the stuff I mentioned above a lot of the corruption might ultimately sort itself out.

I also thought about telling Stalin that he really needs to think about maybe approaching collectivization of the farms a bit differently. But I don't know what I'd tell him to do differently though. It was a mess at first but eventually the collective farms helped get Soviet agriculture where it needed to be, I think.

i don't watch many movies. stop getting mad at stuff online and tell me what to watch

I know chuddery is just a facet of applied liberalism, but for the sake of distinguishing this from the other thread about the most liberal movies, try to think of movies that cut out the "reconciliation with bad people" style liberalism and go straight for the chud pleasure centers, whether intentional or not. Chuds are absolutely horrible at literary comprehension, so a lot of chud films might be unintentionally chud films.

Example of an unintentional chud movie: Starship Troopers. Verhoven never intended to inspire an entire generation of chanlords on their baby goosesteps into fascism, but here we are. https://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/#!

Example of an intentional chud movie: American Sniper. :frothingfash:

The Pursuit of Happyness is really bad. Will Smith's inspirational moment is going to the New York Stock Exchange and seeing all the happy rich guys in suits walking around, and wanting to be like them. Having to do stuff like brown-nose executives, sleep in train station bathrooms and pull his son out of daycare due to lack of money are presented not as flaws of the system but evidence of Smith's smart bootstraps-oriented thinking. This movie is the Mein Kampf of liberalism.

Starting to get that feeling in the first 26 pages. It’s great and have wanted to read it for a while now. But wondering what the take is here on it overall.

The line he literally wrote about the population size of Russia being unsuitable for socialism is like verbatim RW criticism used today and typically repeated when saying that it while it may work in small European counties it won’t here.

Need also to brush up on the Russian Revolution, having only read some of John Reed’s account.

I listened to the recent episode from "The Deprogram" podcast which had Richard Wolff on. He made an excellent point about how the modern day field of Economics utilizes a cryptic language commonly parroted by media yet unfamiliar to the average person (record inflation, stocks, federal reserve's actual role, etc) as a means to mystify and grant legitimacy to capitalism as something only "Qualified Experts" (who just so happen to support Capitalism) have authority to speak on. Literally looking up any book about "basic economics" will have the first result be a book by Chicago School snake oil salesman Thomas Sowell, who has quite the following in the Right, which is just several layers of pure ideology repackaged as "common sense".

This is an image problem that the Left need to tackle one way or another on a regular basis, whether it be in debates with such "Economists" or long typed-out critiques. And as great as the classics are, what Marx and Lenin were talking about in their times (19th/20th Century Prussia and Russia) isn't as familiar to the average Westerner today as someone actively tackling a more close-to-home environment; which is a common talking point ("bruh you can't compare those places at those times to America!")

So, in essence, I'm looking for sources which identify commonly regurgitated terms/concepts, provides definitions and contexts and, as a bonus, takes them down from a Left standpoint. Something that we can learn from and direct others to as well. I've been meaning to read the works of Graeber and Fisher but I feel like they talk either in something more abstract/specific than I'm looking for.

Mine are any that deal with the US government /American life that imply a hidden undercurrent of demonic or eldritch influence animating everything, examples include SCP-2736, SCP-1981, SCP-4444 and SCP-6250

"Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism." - J. V. Stalin

"Women hold up half of the sky." - Mao Zedong (though a more or less common saying attributed to many)

“Civilize the mind but make savage the body” - Mao Zedong

"Socialism or barbarism." - K. Kautsky

"Poor countries aren’t underdeveloped, they are overexploited." - Prof. Dr. M. Parenti.

"Who has been saved by the United States?" - Fidel Castro

"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror." - Dr. K. Marx

But i also like more jokey ones ;

"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere

“Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him.” - V. I. Lenin

"Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin." - unknown

"If you don’t steal from your boss, you’re stealing from your family." - unknown

"It’s [date] and Stalin saved the world from fascism" - unknown

Like from the moment you step in a gun store. Definitely gonna arm myself just don’t know how to do it

Small update to my previous post about coming out(?) to my mom.

I went over to my sister's apartment earlier and gave her the low down. Her first course of business was to hug me and tell me she loves me, which was good. She took it a LOT better than my mom, and that made me feel much more comfortable. I found myself saying and discussing things ("makeup", "transitioning", "girl"! Egads, the scandal!) that I couldn't force myself to mention when talking with my mother. She was super supportive and listened to everything and asked good questions and made me feel validated, whereas with my mom I felt myself scrambling to do damage control and keep things tentative and hypothetical. When I was able to share how I was feeling in an open and welcoming environment I felt so much better and more confident than before. Shocker, right?

The biggest part was, towards the end, when I got brave enough to say that I might end up being her sister. She just broke down crying, and told me that she'd always wanted to have a sister. Hearing her say that gave me this indescribable feeling inside, and I think it was a good one. I know that however this ends up resolving that I've got her in my corner. She's coming over to have dinner with me and my mom tomorrow, and hopefully she can reassure my mom that everything is going to be okay. One day at a time, I suppose.

Thanks again to everyone who gave counsel and encouragement with my last post! I'm feeling a lot better about this and hope to share more good news in the future, although I'll try to keep from clogging the site up with my ramblings. On that note, does anyone have suggestions for communities more expressly dedicated to talking about stuff like this?

like how many fucking mass shootings have their boards done at this point???

I ask because I truly don't know. Are they aware of the contradictions?

Don't you dare tell them to wear a mask and socially distance during a pandemic! :frothingfash:

Your front yard better look like fuzzy green concrete and be absent of any meaningful ecosystem or they'll harass you and get the city and even the police involved if they can. :grillman:

They think kids these days are too easily offended by their edgy jokes that haven't changed since the 90s. :frothingfash:

You better not insult their boys in blue (who never wear blue anymore and in fact try to LARP as soldiers as often as possible) and you better not insult their brave troops in harm's way (who were put there by their fellow :grillman: war profiteers) and you better not make fun of :lmayo: or call them :lmayo: and you better stand for the flag salute with sufficient tears in your eyes or else. :grillman:

They believe cancel culture is out of control and has gone too far! :frothingfash:

They've been blacklisting and shunning anyone too "uppity" for them forever. See how quickly Sinead O'Connor's career vanished after insulting the Pope. Or the Dixie Chicks after they didn't praise the latest profiteer war with sufficient zeal. "GamerGate" itself was about trying to cancel anyone making games that weren't about grizzled white men killing otherfied monsters to avenge their fridged wives and/or to protect their sexually objectified teenage stepchildren. :stupidpol:

They only want the freedom to deny freedom to others. Full stop.

Are they conscious of this? At all? I truly can't tell. :thinking-about-it:

Try to think of something advanced but theoretically possible that would rapidly proliferate. No weapons.

My first thought was some kind of farm tech leading to a second agricultural revolution, allowing AES countries to thrive despite sanctions. Some leap forward in permaculture or vertical farms or whatever.

Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.

Upton Sinclair wrote an expose on how manipulated American factory workers were and how socialism was the answer. And everyone’s takeaway was just, “ew they’re putting rats in our food”. Which, yeah that sucks, but is kinda missing the bigger picture.

Anyway, whenever I see issues with the FDA being underfunded I think about some of the imagery in that book and cringe

Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they're a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don't agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn't. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I'm not sure where to put this, sorry.

I'll mention something different for my own contribution than my usual:

I've always hated Seinfeld, including when his show was brand new. "It's a show about nothing!" was a thought terminating cliche in the 90s that was used to pitch the show at me again and again by its fans, and also to dismiss any and all problems I had with the show and its ultra-privileged smarmy main character. If I got anything valuable out of that show and for that matter his stand up routine, it was a lifelong allergy to New Yorker comedy that front loads a whole lot of "I am a New Yorker which means I am smarter and tougher and wiser and more cultured and more sophisticated yet more grounded than you" self-aggrandizement into the set. :nyet:

EDIT: Please post your own disliked Hexbear-approved popular things! Don’t just reply to mine! :rage-cry:

I understand most of the how, but I do not understand the why of reactionary/regressive sentimentality among so many self-described "futurologists," not just on :reddit-logo: but people I've met in real life while attending conferences of such enthusiasts, back when I was :LIB: and naive enough to believe that it was going to be a lot of talking about how to make Star Trek come true for everyone, not a trade expo where Department of Defense contractors show off their latest ways to control and murder people and creepy cultists find new billionaire gods to fill the void in themselves.

For all the talk of "singularities" and of unimaginable wonders that would change everything, there was this quaint and grotesque aesthetic sense that such an unknowable future would surely, totally, have all of the inherent capital contradictions of today (rich white men in charge) and nothing would fundamentally change in the culture except the billionaires living forever and the mass destruction of the environment to make more phones would spread into space. :biden-harbinger:

How could the speculative future, supposedly so wildly advanced and strange that life itself would be redefined and all old limitations would disappear, also be so stagnant, so stale, so conservative and so boring to imagine? :grillman:

See also :my-hero: 's tweets showing his futuristic dreams of... multi-lane highways for cars on Mars. :grillman:

I know the so-called "extropians" have been a publicly known thing since the 90s, but they didn't quite take over such conferences until their billionaire masters literally bought the venues in the early 2000s.

My best guess is the prevalent ideology itself was just early 1900s Italian Futurism all along with a new coat of paint that fooled me for years, particularly Italian Futurism's featured hatred and desire to enslave women, contempt for the humanities and the desire to burn down libraries and erase history itself in a grandiose display of arrogance and hubris.

How much of this, written roughly a century ago, sounds like it could have come out of an Epic G*mer rant in a CSGO chatbox?

We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

https://smarthistory.org/italian-futurism-an-introduction/

This pandemic has really fucking sucked, man. I was starting to make plans to come out of my shell and be more social right before COVID hit, then immediately put off those plans once it had spread throughout the US.

For the last two years, I have been living with my family and being incredibly cautious, i.e. no traveling, no gathering in large crowds, no indoor dining, etc.--basically spending the overwhelming majority of my time at home. I still haven't gotten COVID (to my knowledge), but the pandemic has taken a toll on my mental health, pretty much from being so lonely and having a virtually non-existent social life. I mean I obviously saw my family every day and always appreciate their company, but save for seeing friends a few times, I have had almost no interaction otherwise, y'know?

Now that I'm finally moved out of my parents and living on my own, I feel comfortable enough to finally start thinking about dating for the first time in my life. I just started downloading some free dating apps (which, LOL, so much shit is behind a paywall, even basic features that should be free like filtering--yay, capitalism!). But like I can't imagine that most people would be willing to put up with me not wanting to eat indoors or go to a bar because of me not wanting to take my mask off (does anyone with lots of dating experience right now know if this caution about indoors stuff is common?). Taking your mask off indoors in a public place is probably the easiest way to get COVID, but I also feel like dining at a restaurant, getting a cup of coffee, seeing a movie, etc. are fundamental to the dating experience. Obviously outdoor dining options exist, but that might not always be the best option, weather permitting.

To this point, I've been taking all this precaution because I'm still afraid of COVID and long COVID in particular scares the shit out of me (as an aside, does anyone know if other diseases also exhibit/exhibited similar long-term effects?). I'm not even immunocompromised or anything, just sounds like some awful stuff to have to deal with.

But at the same time, I hate being so atomized and the toll it has on my mental health, largely as a result of all this caution. I'm certainly not getting any younger (27), our sociopathic leaders of the western world are clearly content to just let this shit rip and eschew even the most basic precautions, and the most :doomer: side of me thinks that things in America are going to get much, much worse in the not-so-distant future, maybe even before the end of the decade. For those reasons, I'm feeling like it's becoming increasingly useless to wrap myself in bubble wrap and watching my life pass by, and that I should just try to live a relatively normal life with what youth I have left, even if it significantly increases my chance of getting :covid-cool: and any nasty repercussions from that. And hell, who knows, maybe this virus will get even more ridiculously contagious that one-way mask wearing will become completely useless.

Anyone have any advice or been trying to come to terms with similar thoughts?

So maybe this is a silly idea, but I'd previously heard about this Dutch group called "Women on Waves" who would send a hospital ship to help women get abortions who'd otherwise be restricted. On their sister website they also have a way to request abortion pills by mail. From their site:

A medical abortion using Mifepristone and Misoprostol is the most common and effective method. The Mifepristone is taken first and blocks the hormones needed to sustain the pregnancy. After 24 hours, the Misoprostol is taken, which relaxes and opens the cervix and causes contractions in the uterus, helping to expel the pregnancy from the body. Medical abortion is a process that can take up to 2 weeks or even until your next menstruation to be completed, but most women return to their daily routines after 1-2 days.

We strongly advise you to hold the Misoprostol under your tongue to ensure no remains can be found in your system. In the event you need to seek medical attention, Misoprostol will not show up on any blood tests and therefore there is no way to prove you have tried to terminate your pregnancy.

A medical abortion done in the first trimester is proven to be 98% effective and is considered safer than regular childbirth or using over the counter medicines such as ibuprofen and high-dosage aspirin. Both medicines, Mifepristone and Misoprostol, can be found on the WHO’s Core Model List of Essential Medicines.

Some questions I was thinking about:

1. Could mailing/smuggling Mifepristone and Misoprostol to states that ban abortion be feasibly done through left orgs (including groups like DSA)?

2. Would there be any legal consequences for groups doing this, or any other potential threats to be aware of?

3. How difficult would it be to procure Mifepristone and Misoprostol in large quantities for this purpose?

Obviously, Women on Web is already doing this, but it makes more sense to me if this operation were done stateside, wherever possible, when targeting restrictions in red states.

Again, maybe it's a silly idea, but maybe also it could be a useful tool to make these restrictions at least partially ineffective.

Thoughts?

Some starters:

-the Fediverse

-the subreddit

-the Great Vegan Debacle

-The banning of r/chapotraphouse

More obscure:

-The pronoun struggle session

-How the movie nights got started

-How the comms were created

-outdoor cats

-@black_mold_futures

-@TimeCubeEvangelist

Don't go further

-@Beatnik

-@Enver_Hoxha

-@BASED_BALL