I love Touché Amoré for similar reasons. Their album “Stage Four” is all about the singer’s experience with losing his mother to cancer. It’s tragic and beautiful, and manages to be relatable despite its specificity.

Anything la dispute. I find la dispute to be extremely proletarian music, although not outright revolutionary. “Hudsonville MI 1956” is my favorite example of the people-centered nature of their music. “Nine” is phenomenal in this regard, too. The “Wildlife” album goes into extreme intimate detail about facets of human suffering and empathy I’ve never seen any other band begin to approach.

People should rightfully be nervous about getting band tattoos as image for bands in the punk/post-hardcore scene can flip on a dime because of how many abusers there are in the scene. I got my tattoo 4 years ago and don’t regret it whatsoever. The band continues and continues to impress me with their support for feminist and pro-LGBT causes and ideas. They have some of the safest shows out of any musicians for women and people at risk for assault because they train their security specifically to be on the lookout for abusers / gropers and have an absolute no-tolerance policy for that shit.

There’s some memes around about la dispute being whiney or whatever, and I understand it not being to peoples’ personal tastes, but outright disdain for the band and music based on internet shitheads makes me sad and I think people are missing out on really hard-hitting experiences by passing them up.

https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.4.0428 This seems really interesting. Note: I haven’t read it yet, nor have I read too into its source. This paper comes from an ostensibly Marxist group is all I know, and the title seems relevant. I’m gonna read it now.

edit: group is cool as hell: article explains Belarus’s economy and foreign relations very well. I think an argument is pretty convincingly made that Belarus is pursuing socialism of a certain type, “market socialism”, but not precisely Marxist or communist.

based and goodvibepilled

Yeah, hate to disappoint this individual but as someone who’s lived in basically every type of area but a major city or suburb (as in, extremely rural to less extremely rural to semi-rural to semi-urban) it does not get better. Meth is everywhere, cops are just as brutal (they just operate under the cover of darkness without nearly as much oversight, which is saying A LOT as there is almost none in major cities too). Sheriffs act like de facto warlords over their jurisdictions at times. Rural areas are great for robber barons (esp. landlords and franchise owners) as well, so it’s not like you escape the wealth inequality and everyone’s poor. It’s the wild west goddamn everywhere except maybe suburbs, because only prim and proper “upper middle class” (net worth varies state by state) salaried workers can hope to ever live in those areas, and cops love them (as long as they’re white). There is “still” rampant violence against BIPOC in these areas (still in quotes because it’s all a facet of the systematic apartheid that keeps those places wealthy). Amerikans are shitty pretty much everywhere, in different ways, because they’ve been socialized to be. Bystander effect, bootstrap-pulling, and I’ve-got-mine-fuck-you ideology are baked deep into the Amerikan psyche. And some of them are good people (just getting utterly fucked over).

An interesting phenomena I’ve been noticing is that the richer and whiter the area, the more Amerikan flags you see placed outside of peoples’ houses. The poorer and less white areas, less so.

It’s crazy how many people I’d wager share that experience. Vaping is all over schools now (not like smoking isn’t still). After the nationwide ban on smoking under 21, I just (and I’m sure many others) just had friends buy cigarettes/vapes.

@Roof_Roach@lemmygrad.ml

It’s a good idea. I was on Wellbutrin when I was 18, for MDD, but it turned out that 1. if I drank more than a beer on it, I blacked out completely and 2. I actually am Bipolar and so it might have been doing more harm than good. It’s not a bad recommendation at all, I think it helped me with cravings back then, too, and I don’t really drink much anymore anyway, I’m mostly just worried about the interactions with my other meds. Thanks for the input and the kind words, both.

Thank you. I started vaping lol. I realized that was far, far worse for me because of the ludicrous potency of the nicotine in most vapes. Instead of heading outside to take a walk and smoke, I was lounging around absolutely lethargic because of the brainblast from it. Then if they got burned (which they did regularly because I suck at vaping) I would be inhaling straight formaldehyde from the burnt cotton. I quit that by chewing some nicotine gum, and by not allowing myself to purchase another… it was hell for a couple of weeks, but I got through it. I feel like I could probably do it again, the chemicals in my brain are just trying very hard to convince me that I don’t want to quit, I think.

Thank you comrade, and ditto. I’m giving up most video games for a while because I had a bit of a League addiction (again), so that’s off the table haha. A lot of other things are looking up at least, it’s just hard to crawl out of the pit to get there. I just got some new John Grisham novels and have a bunch of awesome shows I need to watch, so I’ll use those to entertain myself for sure.

Does the virtual hellworld go through the same progressive economic stages as the meatworld? E-feudalism, e-capitalism, e-socialism, e-communism? Virtual slave revolts and virtual Pinkermen and virtual war crimes? Will there be an e-Zuckerberg to make a Meta-Meta, where the cycle repeats?

I don’t think you’re overanalyzing at all, but I don’t have much novel to say about the subject I think. It definitely seems like there’s a correlation between the dwindling of meaningful real-life relationships and social events and a society’s celebrity obsession, even better when it’s someone who can point out your comment and say something “to you” through a screen. The CPC is taking steps to combat obsessive celebrity culture and I think it’s the right call, I wonder how far those steps translate to parasocial relationships. I know the social media ban on “effeminate men” that western media loved to hype up as homophobic was actually an attack against online influencers telling their (usually young) audiences that they have to get plastic surgery and whiten their skin to be attractive, so it’s cool to see that they’re cracking down on some of the more obviously harmful parasocial relationships.

I’m gonna be honest and say that I’m an absolutely impatient moron when it comes to the Paradox grand strategy games and I cheat like crazy… if you like military strategy and resource management, you’ll enjoy it w/o cheats. Personally I just like to liberate western Asia as tankie Iran 🇮🇷 ⚒️ and focus on the more roleplay elements than anything else

the only good CoD campaign was the Soviet one in World at War. raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in first-person, just (chef’s kiss) brilliant

It’s difficult to enjoy. Sometimes I play as Amerika in Hearts of Iron IV or the mod for it Kaiserreich, but I always either push it communist or attempt to balkanize the hell out of myself and create a non-country lol. It’s cooler in Kaiserredux/Kaiserreich because you can set up a communist federation allied with a socialist black belt nation and an independent socialist Texas, stuff like that. Any type of playstyle that even mildly upholds Amerikan values… I’d rather just not.

Same with the Civilization games. I put them in some of my versus AI games just to feel the catharsis of liberating their cities, but I could never play them without feeling yucky.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J236v07n01_08?journalCode=wzgp20 I found this pretty informative. Homophobia is not a Chinese phenomenon, but an ideal imposed upon China by the West and Chinese thinkers enamored with the West.

(if you want to read the full article w/o paywall look up sci-hub and input the doi link)

Silly ass pipe dream but what are the ramifications if he won the presidency on that ticket? Or if they become a sizable minority within congress? Obviously their policy ideas won’t be meaningfully any different from the repubdems, but it’d be a pretty weird time if a third party of any caliber got representation.

woops Plot Against America is an HBO series, but it’s still awesome

Amazon originals upset me because some of them are phenomenal. Invincible is not only one of my favorite animated shows, but one of my favorite pieces of contemporary media I’ve seen. The Boys is really good (at least S1-2, haven’t seen 3) and has some damn impressive criticism of the military industrial complex, celebrity worship, the military-entertainment-complex, and fascism. The Plot Against America is a great show in a similar vein to MITHC about Charles Lindbergh taking over the U.S. and a Jewish family struggling to survive – it portrays the Soviet Union in a very positive light, with the main lead watching a newsreel of the Eastern Front and cheering on the Red Army – “go get 'em boys”, etc. One of the main characters gets associated with communists when he defects to Canada to fight the Nazis, and he pays respect to the communists for being willing to fight the Nazis. It’s just crazy how some of this stuff made it onto Amazon. Something about them selling revolution back to us, I guess. But I still have huge respect for the showrunners and actors who made this stuff possible, even if its distributors are scum.

So far, no anti-communist stuff. Some lines indicating that Stalin was executed in 1949 and it spelled unimaginable doom for the world.

Another thing I respect about the show is that it circumvents a lazy and dishonest rhetorical trap I’ve come to loathe: the idea that fascist states look like black-and-white, constantly dreary prison planets where the sun doesn’t shine and nobody smiles. The show goes to great lengths to show you that it is miserable and existentially horrifying for many people to live in the Nazi American Reich / Japanese Pacific States, but does so in full color juxtaposed with white nuclear families playing games and watching Nazi propaganda with a smile on their faces eating pretzels in front of the TV, and Japanese settlers enjoying the power they hold over their subjects while they live relatively well-off lives reminiscent of the “American dream”.

It’s important not to overly mythologize the Nazi / fascist state as it robs it of its human element and treats it as something alien and impossible, rather than the living reality of millions of people in the nations many of us live in, pertinently colonized native and black people in the U.S. as well as enslaved prison laborers. Although the natives are being systematically annihilated, although black people are wantonly being murdered by the state and incarcerated exponentially more than whites, although prisoners are the backbone of the entire U.S. economy, John Pettybougman, his loving wife, and their two and a half kids continue to play catch and enjoy life on their green lawns with a dazzling sun overhead, just as Aryan desirables did as the ashes from the crematoriums were falling as snow in the Reich.

The industrial revolution and its consequences… etc etc