Comradeship // Freechat

Firstly, please excuse my bad English, but it isn't my first or second language.

I came to this community about a year ago (during the Reddit exodus). Someone on Reddit recommended Lemmy and while searching for a community I stumbled upon Lemmygrad. I don't know why, but I didn't expect there would be an active socialist forum. As an ML, it seemed like a no-brainer to join this one.

I'm mostly a so-called “lurker”, but are almost daily on here. I truly appreciate the news links, discussions, memes and more. It's a fresh air in the normal pro-right/capitalism news that I'm confronted with daily. It's even at a point that I can recognize many names around here 😅.

Furthermore, the kind and inclusive vibe is unfortunately rare in today's internet, and is something that I really miss about the old days. Fortunately, it's some that I can still experience here.

I just wanted to let you all know I sincerely appreciate the community and you all personally! Keep up the great content and the good vibes ❤️

I'm gonna scale back how much time I spend online but it's pretty damn boring. I've been on sedentary lifestyle since the lock down and to put it bluntly it's starting to take its toll. I can even feel the effects of a sedentary lifestyle negatively affecting my gaming sessions.

I'm riding a bike again after giving up several times. I already know how to swim in deep waters. Any other ideas? I am looking for other hobbies outside art and gaming.

I'm Asian The first thing whites ask me is what size my dick is

The first thing I ask whites is how racist they are

Just found wi-fi.

How are you all, good comrades?

It might help you too idk.

For pretty much all my life I thought hobbies had to be creative or at least produce something. E.g. guitar, drawing, photography, creative writing, playing sports, etc.

I think this is the case for many people, we believe that a hobby has to produce something at the end of the process, or teach you something, to count as a hobby.

I also thought that you had to spend a lot of time doing something to count as a hobby, or that you had to be an expert in it. And that you could only have one.

It was while playing a video game that I realized hobbies were something completely different, and the devs didn't even intend for it lol.

Hobbies are basically anything you like to spend time on. Keeping up with world news, spending time with friends, discovering new things (music, cool places around town).

It can even be more abstract: organizing information (if you like to collect things), becoming more efficient (less time spent on one task), solving math problems... even daydreaming might be a hobby.

I think a hobby is more accurately defined as something you do during your leisure time somewhat regularly. It doesn't need to be your whole thing, it doesn't need to be something you intend to become great at, and it doesn't need to be something that you've done since childhood and will do until you die. It might not even be something you particularly enjoy doing over something else (e.g. daydreaming - I imagine most people do it naturally and don't really think about it).

I grow chili pepper plants for example in a single pot and I'm starting to consider it a hobby. This hobby is not gardening; it's taking care of my one chili plant. It's one of my many hobbies, I'm not going to scale it up (well, maybe just a little bit) or become a gardener, and that's fine!

Anyway, you might find this useful.

I've been in Uni for a few years now and I have to say the "weird kids" to me aren't the ones with dyed hair, the ones that play their Switch on campus, or even the guys who don't shower.

No, the weirdest kids are the ones who show up to class everyday just to talk their heads off in the back of the room. Can you imagine that? Imagine spending 10K to dick around instead of actually pay attention.

Since red., DD Geopolitics etc. have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms after the stupidest US State Department announcement, I was thinking twice about joining Rumble. However, the biggest obstacle for joining was queerphobia.

PS: Might invite red. and DD Geopolitics to join the site.

there's a guy that i'm mutuals with on other social media who's on the young side, like just out of college, and he's figuring out what he thinks about politics. he's pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he's definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he's critically engaging with stuff well.

however, it seems like he's seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx's writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people's experience.

I ain't young, but this is my first election where I am a real lefty, and... Has it always been this bad?

The liberal seething is just disgusting right now. You can't be on any place of the internet that has any discussion about politics whatsoever.

If you suggest that the Democrats should be better, then you get called out for trying to make Trump president

If you respond that now is the time to actually put pressure on candidates because they're running for office and in any fucking reasonable place, this is where they would make campaign promises and you can demand stuff out of them, then they say that you're being a fascist.

The liberal propaganda is just mind numbing.

Even the traditionally leftist places on Reddit (a place I visit very infrequently, so small changes add up over time when I visit and see the crazies have come out of the woodworks) are getting inundated with a bunch of "but the GOP is worse", and "we have to compromise" and blah blah blah. Even in some commie spaces.

Like I understand not being a doomer, and trying to actually make things better in the meantime while we build forces for the revolution, but holy shit, it's like Anyone to the right of Marxist Leninists have immediately caved to pressure.

Link

I don't have a penny, the next food bank appointment is 30th Sept. I don't know how I'll last that long. Any faster ways?

Tw: self-harm, mental illness, addiction, trauma, abuse, discrimination

I have cptsd, panic disorder, depression, anxiety, ADD, and autism. They said I have high functioning autism but I make 20k a year and cannot function well enough to do basic things or have thoughts in my head so I don't know about the high functioning part.

Loner here. I'm in my early 30s and puttering through life without accumulating skills. I work a dead end medical documenting job from home that doesnt interest me at all. I dont have any interest in any field. I never go to develop that part of myself and it's too late now because of the hand to mouth nature of my existence which seems to be getting only worse for the foreseeable future. I have the generous support of a couple of family members who are themselves very isolated and struggling. Without them I'd be on the street. Everyday I see myself as a burden and cannot escape the thought that when they are gone one day I will have to off myself somehow, if not sooner. But since I can't seem to do anything right, I'm scared I will botch the attempt and survive.

I'm still struggling with cptsd just as much as ever. Despite having quit alcohol years ago and a couple of other addictive behaviors since. Despite leaving my abuser nearly a decade ago. Despite moving from the US to Canada. This place is not all it's cracked up to be if you're a struggling poor. There's basically no social safety net, the people are a bunch of liberal zionists, it's frozen over for half the year, and there's no way to make any money. I don't go out or talk to anyone but I know fully well that we do not live in anything resembling a functional society. That's the only conclusion I can reach when I cannot trust the healthcare system, cannot rely on public transport, cannot trust a single word anybody says, cannot expect to ever have my own place to live, cannot find a real job, etc.

I am also not a part of any online "communities" either because I cannot read posts that are too long or care about other people's stories. I'm not much on social media. Most of my internet use is just listening to YouTube but that stuff goes in one ear out the other because of my mental problems. It just seems pointless to try because my brain is like a sieve. I graduated from university while I was stuck in a mental hospital that I was dragged into by a couple of campus cops. I didn't make any friends in college or school or since. Can't even remember much of what I studied. It was some kind of history degree. I was drinking heavily at home with my abusive dad and we were codependent. Eventually I was rescued from him and he drank himself to death. All I got from the degree was debt and a piece of paper.

So anyway i have been recently assigned a couple of goals for the next year. They are...

1. increasing my muscular strength with the use of a lifting regimen and consuming adequate protein. I spent years in the gym without making Amy noticeable improvements, due in part to not going hard enough but also because I just wasn't getting enough protein at all. Like maybe 60-80 g daily at most. I was loaded on carbs and chronically dehydrated.
2. reading a series of self help and spiritual development books. I'm currently on Joe Dispenza's Becoming Supernatural and it's given me the first ideas I've had in a long time.

Here is what I want to change.... My day to day is just a repetitive set of autopilot behaviors. My brain is not useful for any purpose that I've seen other people use their brains for. I can't seem to be present in the moment. I'm always forgetting simple things and need to be hand held through tasks. I have to be given exact instructions that are pain staking to go through for the other person and even then I will probably ask a dozen questions and then screw the task up anyway. I wish to die from morning to night. I always want to sleep but i never feel rested afterwards. Some nights I don't bother brushing my teeth. I have no aspirations or interests. I have been like this for as long as I can remember, but it's gotten worse since 2016, then even worse since 2020. I can only think in negative terms. What do I not want to do? What is it I'm not able to accomplish? It seems like others can go through life accumulating things they can do, but I'm going through life with an ever expanding list of things I cannot do. Apparently my situation is pretty common, but again I have no interest in others because I cannot seem to get my own head straight. My nervous system seems to be stuck in the sympathetic state permanently. I've burned every bridge for venting I can burn. Counselors, forums, relatives, the few friends I made when I was living in the US. It's like I'm this black hole of trauma-induced mental health symptoms. Meds can't seem to do anything. Therapists are beyond what I can afford and whatever advice they have seems to be for upper-middle class tech workers with well-connected parents and vacation homes in the Caribbean.

So as I've said I started reading Joe Dispenza lately. I got to the part where he discusses how imbalances of our lower 3 chakras can cause our body to drain from the EM field surrounding us and prevent the flow of electrical charge up to the higher energy centers. I'm not here to debate if it's "real" or not. I try to keep an open mind, and it's not like psych meds have done anything for me anyway. I did the breathing exercise where you release your mind from your body and felt like it really jacked up my heart rate and for once I could actually notice a brief difference in my subjective experience. I'd really like to continue doing this on daily basis. I hope something actually works for my cptsd recovery.

Anyway i guess this has been a long-winded way of saying I'm struggling to improve as a traumatized shut-in. If you have found non-pharma approaches to healing from complex trauma, let's discuss them. My messages are open. Thanks folks.

Hi, I just discovered this site. I'm hoping to make some friends. I'm stuck at home and lonely. So I'll tell you a bit about myself. I'm cis female, ace. I've been having cancer treatment for quite a while and recently had a stroke. I'm going through a disability benefit appeal. All my friends drifted away when I got sick as I was no longer fun. The last time i saw my friends was at my 25th birthday party. I'm turning 41 this year. I've had no social life or offline companionship since then. I worked several jobs including fitness instructor and carer for the elderly, then went to university in my 20s to study philosophy. I had to drop out due to the side effects of my cancer meds.

My life now revolves around endless benefit assessments, last one I was awarded zero points and had my money stopped. I'm currently fighting it but now have no money at all and a maxxed out overdraft. Food bank access is awful so I'm starving constantly. I've been learning to walk again since the stroke. Previously I was sporty but now it's painful to even walk. So I wanted to take up art as a hobby, start learning to draw from scratch but I can't even afford paper and pencils.

So, life is awful. I need a distraction and someone to talk to. I used to talk to the people on a suicide pact forum (I've already made on attempt and often feel desperate enough to try again) but I just got banned from there for trying to sell my meds on there. Don't judge me please - I was only trying to do that out of financial desperation! So now I have literally no-one to talk to online or in real life.

Obviously I'm a leftist. I'm sick of this world where some people are billionaires while millions starve.

I want create an organisation (or work for an already created one) that provides support to companies that wish to be worker-controlled and certify those companies such that people can choose these companies when making purchasing decisions.

The needs I can immediately see are clear organising agreement templates for the company guaranteeing worker control, worker ownership scheme policy templates (e.g., when a worker leaves), and worker voting policy templates. Perhaps after an organisation has implemented these controls, they may be listed as a certified worker-controlled establishment.

Background: I'm a anarcho-communist and when I need to consume, I would love to give power to worker-controlled institutions instead of capitalists. I have found few databases of worker-controlled businesses and none that were providing any goods/services I would actually need on a usual basis. I'm a corporate lawyer (fuck me) so I understand the governance required to distribute profits within a company. I don't see an organisation providing guidance to new businesses started by workers who want to keep their interests where they should be, returning profits to workers.

Do you have any thoughts on this, comrades? Worth the effort?

Beyond the typical statistical manipulation of homelessness trends and the differing methods of data collection from state-state, city-city, etc I figured I would share a thought I had, before I discovered this place. Also, I say "housing insecurity" because a nursing home/assisted-living technically isn't considered "homeless". Wording, I suppose.

I did maintenance at a few nursing homes. A lot of these nursing homes would have quite a few people with disabilities that had their entire support structure abandoned. A sort of "last-stop" for those who didn't want to help or continue helping their children, family, friends, etc. Some of these people were actually relatively functional...just had nowhere to go and obviously unable to navigate the world by themselves.

In a facility of 120, there were at least 12 I remember at a single time. Shit really took me for a whirl because really; how common is this shit specifically? Three years I worked there and during COVID it only got worse.

Rant over.

Basically, wanted to know where people are at with mask wearing (as it relates to containing covid and all), I know it's been a while since it started. And I've seen people who say covid can still be threatening, like through long covid and such, even if the initial impact doesn't tend to be as bad. Being in the US, it's especially hard to tell what makes sense because the gov sorta gave up on containment a while back and only ever half-assed pushing mask wearing. And wearing a mask alone was a controversial thing in some places, even in the very beginning. Then there's vaccines, which of course help, but seems to be a thing like the flu where you have to get boosters to be fully covered for variant strains.

So in general, I'm wondering stuff like:

1. Do you still wear a mask or not and why? And do you have distinctions like large crowds or anything like that?

2. How does mask wearing compare by country, from what you know? For example, I'm sure China has a more pro-mask-wearing culture and policy overall, but I'm not clear on where they're at this late into it.

Partly asking cause I want to re-assess my own position on it, see if it makes sense to change it at all by now. I've still been doing it, in part out of inertia, but the US management of it is such a mess, in gov and culture, it's hard to tell when it makes sense to stop vs. just caving to peer pressure of people who were never acting responsibly to begin with.

Israel has literally been bombing Lebanese territory for almost a year now, they just blew up random civilians in Lebanon, and now it is heavily implied that they are preparing an invasion if Lebanon.

At this point, there is no way that Hezbollah alone is prepared to resist Israeli aggression, surely the official Lebanese government and military is prepared as well?

I was wondering what places you all find have the most reliable info about current events? Any specific news sites that do a good job of actually reporting on stuff most places ignore? Mostly looking for written articles rather than videos.

Guy with a Churchill profile picture yelling at the guy with a Stalin profile picture for idolizing someone who killed millions in a famine.

Guy who spells it "Amerikkka" telling the guy who spells it "Drumpf" that he's doing a pointless virtue signal for cred.

Guy who says Communist Parties are authoritarian because the 9 people on the Central Committee aren't directly elected telling the guy who wants to reform the Supreme Court he's against democracy.

People want to have it both ways.

Hexbear user checking in to let you all know you rock and have very good comms that I find super informative

Hi comrades,

This winter I intent to dress fully punk. (I love the culture surrounding punk) I have plenty of experience printing my own T-Shirts with stencils, patches etc. But now I want to upgrade my leather and denim jacket with studs, cuz this would look cool af.

No the issue is, that I don't have a lot of money (fuck earning less than minimum wage). So I will have to order studs from Ali Express. I need basic studs.

The question I have now is, what studs would you recommend, and how many. I wanna play around a bit and make cool things.

The picture is my current denim jacket. It looks way cooler opened

There is this youtube channel called "rational animation" that is full of libaral brainrot. This one video being a prime example.

The ousing liberalism and idealism in this channel has been bothering me for a while and I've been wanting to ask your opinions and criticisms of it.

So, Leftypol supposedly had a hard drive crash, but on Getchan, the admins admitted that Moffintosh (Moffin'?) was Zankaria (board developer).

As far as I'm concerned, Leftypol was a glowtrap the entire time. (There are rumors about lemmygrad as well, but tbh, Moffin actively tried to force a pro-NATO / anti-Chinese and anti-Russian point of view with what seemed to have been NAFO.

https://getchan.net/GET/res/103743.html#103800

Ultimately, I have some ideas for alternatives, but I'm not yet able to permanently cut ties with the West, so I can't implement yet.

The biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull on the working class is convincing the working class that it doesn't exist.

The second biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull is convincing us that everything we make, all the culture we do, all the progress we make, is somehow owned by them.

Even many of us fall victim to this thinking. But, just because capitalism now has to pay lip service to feminism, native struggles, queer identity, and oppressed nationalities does not mean we have lost.

They have convinced some of us, and we often convince ourselves, that once the ruling class start paying lip service to our struggle and use our language that the struggle is lost. They said this in the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire was convinced that the contradictions both internal and external would relax and that they could simply make all the barbarians Roman. The Empire would last forever because any rebels could be co-opted and made into Romans. But one day Alaric the Goth did not get a military promotion and the Western half of the Empire fell forever.

Do not let capitalism tell you that because it bottles up your identity to sell it back to you that you've lost.