Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

according to your biological sex

Okay, cool but I’ve never undergone scientific testing to establish my biological sex so I guess I should just stick to being non-binary to avoid this dangerous trap? Pls advise.

This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you’re in that 16-25yo bracket.

With that in mind and from what you’ve said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)

It’s just a wild hunch so I’m not going to go into the why of it but it’s just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That’s really rough.

I’m sorry but I really can’t think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

I’m really white so I don’t have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It’s an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It’s no self-help book and it won’t be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you’re experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

Apparently this is Peterson’s third attempt at establishing a “university”

I’d recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it’s quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It’s very nutritious too.

Basically, if you’re going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won’t even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you’ve adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It’s prole af.

Lol this ain’t reddit, you don’t need to couch requests for sources like that. I’m not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There’s this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There’s so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It’s idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson’s was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson’s exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the “white liberal” (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they’ll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I’ll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.

Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.

It’s entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don’t concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren’t writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn’t really be a high priority imo.

Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class

Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.

This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.

What this means is that I’d urge you to approach people’s takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.

Out of interest, it’s worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”

My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.

Potentially “rent-seeking bourgeoisie”, which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.

To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.

My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.

This is promising!

Next, of course, was postmodernism

I’m an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.

If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I’m being lazy rn.

It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.

It’s hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won’t rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.

Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?

It’s going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.

But I’m rambling.

Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.

There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.

“Fellas, is it possible that [disastrous historical event] was actually a conspiracy caused by [this week’s villainous country]?”

There’s always Xiaomi, right?

the strange phenomenon of people idealizing the past, specifically the 50s, and how the people who tend to have a fondness for the 50s tend to b white as back in the day only middle class white people had happy lives in the 50s, anyone else was screwed.

I have an effortpost here that goes into this in some detail (note the comments following that one - I completely forgot about the relevance of the Bonus Army to the subject.) I didn’t touch on the history of Pruitt and Igoe being the subject of military testing in that comment because it was already too long but:

https://gizmodo.com/pruitt-igoe-army-radiation-experiments-cold-war-1849833275

https://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-toxic-dust-2012-10

You might also be interested in the work of Alice Malone, which touches on the role of homeownership in relation to the state making concessions to workers and attempting to stifle the groundswell of radicalism:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

https://youtu.be/GqIHF-gurlU (also available in your podcast app, search for: Actually Existing Socialism and the episode How the Soviet “Threat” Benefitted Workers in the West.)

One glaring omission from Malone’s article is the quote from none other than William Levitt:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.

Although I’ve tried to find the original source for this quote which is attributed to him in ‘On Communism and the Suburban Home’ from 1948 but I couldn’t turn anything up so maybe that’s why it got excluded.

He compared it to when the British and French went to war against an Arab Socialist, I don’t know hat event he was talking about specifically but it was significant enough that we should’ve learned from that experience and not replicate it in Iraq.

I suspect he was referring to Nasser and the Suez Crisis but I could be wrong.

The past tense is in reference to the historical event, it doesn’t refer to the present state of Finland’s economy.

If someone had a post titled: “How Trump caused a rift within liberalism in the US” the past tense would not imply that Trump no longer exists or that he is no longer a politician, it would simply be referring to the political rift as a historical event.

Wait until you learn about the ties between the defense establishment and the advent of the counterculture music scene…

Which podcasts are you referring to btw?

Then he used Stalin as another example of a leader rewriting history, Stalin rewrote about the USSR’s role in WWII and how the rest of the allies treated the Soviets.

This one is interesting.

So much of the USSR is clouded with poor historical scholarship, especially in the west.

Michael Jabara Carley has written on this, namely 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II and Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (both available on LibGen) and Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930-1936. He details how the rest of the Allies treated the USSR. You might be interested in any or all of them.

I wonder what your professor’s take is on this matter.

What are other lies? What happened in:

Spain (the civil war)

I’d be interested in hearing what was discussed in relation to the Spanish Civil War, if he went into any more depth on the subject.

[My textbooks] can all be found on Lilgen very easily so thankfully I didn’t have to spend a dime

Speaking of which, I put an open call out to people here if they need a hand sourcing ebooks of any kind, including textbooks, because I’m pretty handy at tracking them down even when they aren’t available on LibGen and Zlibrary. Hit me up if you’re ever trying to find an ebook.

Some people swear by reading two+ books at once. I marvel at people who can do that. It might work for you though.

My recommendation is to set up focus mode or whatever it is on your phone. It’s best not to have notifications distracting you.

I’d also recommend not reading on your phone but using an ebook reader or the physical book instead. Use your phone for pulling up definitions, Wikipedia entries, articles etc. that will help you to better understand what’s going on in the theory, as needed.

Highlight passages which speak to you, which are of particular interest, which are the important parts of the book if you were to make a short summary, and especially which you don’t understand or feel like you could understand better.

Revise the highlighted passages each chapter to help consolidate your learnings and to see if further on in the chapter you now understand the highlighted parts make sense to you (and thus can be deleted) or if you need to do some research, post a question to social media or a reading group etc.

If you find that you’re highlighting more than a few passages because you don’t understand them in a chapter then that’s a red flag. Either the theory is too “deep” in conversations with prior texts (this is something that happens with philosophy) and you probably need to read what came before it in order to really grasp what’s being discussed in this book or you might need to read the prior work(s) of the author.

I would recommend engaging in some extra processes to help reinforce the learning. This might mean talking to someone (it can even be a pet!) about your learning. Having a friend who is open to hearing about your learnings is really valuable here - giving them updates on each chapter is great for keeping motivation up and for reinforcing learning. You might want to draft a mini essay or summary of the theory. It doesn’t have to be perfect or make sense because you aren’t going to submit it anywhere but the act of typing out the learnings can really enrich your learning experience and consolidate the learnings.

I’m a savage when it comes to books. I will underline passages and write notes in the margins. I’d recommend it. Or you can put sticky notes in your books if you prefer to. You can even get transparent sticky notes to place over pages and write on.

I’d also recommend reading groups, podcasts, lectures etc. to enrich your learning.

deleted by creator

CW: homophobia ahead!

Them (a majority of the comment content has been removed because it’s a long one with extraneous details):

Me:

Them:

Big “You can’t fire me - I quit!!” energy here

Me:

Them:

Big “You [slurs] call anything homophobic these days!” energy

Me:

Them:

“Getting real sick of these queers clogging up my good, honest anarchist politics with their concern-trolling over homophobia 😡😡”

Me:

Them:

Yeahhh, no small degree of ableism here but I wasn’t even going to try and address it because I was going to pin them on their homophobia and I wanted to make them eat their words by this point. (Also imagine my shock that the radlib who is opining about topics hasn’t done the damn reading.)

Me:

Fuck it, gloves off. I even tried baiting him into making the accusation that me using the grammatical construction cum was homophobic but no dice. Can’t win 'em all…

Them:

“I’m not the non-reader. You’re the non-reader!! 😡😡” and is this tripling-down on the gaslighting? Quadrupling-down? I’ve lost count…

Me:

Yeah, I’m the non-reader. I also need to work on my own ableism.

Them:

“Haha, yeah! You’re right about what I said about you but it’s still not homophobia because I said it in defence of my political position so it’s a justifiable hierarchy! (Also you [slurs] are so obsessed with identity-politicking.) At least I admit when I’m wrong (I’m not wrong though!)”

How dare I use insults!? The absolute audacity…

This guy is a crypto-anarchist. He’s one of these eclectic western leftists who would be a LeftCom if it didn’t require all that damn reading first so instead he’s just an “anti-authoritarian” radical who dedicates a significant amount of their time to being an anti-communist. If it walks like a duck…

This is where the sad excuse for an exchange ends.

There’s absolutely zero accountability or recognition of his homophobia but that’s all for the better because I actually got him to admit he said what he did.

If you could imagine a long-term anarchist (myself) who gradually stopped toeing the line and began to question the orthodoxy, first within anarchist spaces, to meet an increasing level of denialism, apologism, and eventually hostility the more I questioned it then this discussion is something of a metaphor for and a culmination of those prior discussions that I had.

This dork, along with Anark and the nonce who shall not be named, ride on this message of anti-tankies and they claim to have done the reading while fooling their gullible audience by lulling them into complacency by reaffirmating their preconceived political biases.

There was an axis of anti-tankies, prior to the term reaching its fever-pitch use in the discourse, of Jonas Ceika, Red Plateaus, and someone else who I can’t remember… maybe Anarchopac but fortunately Ceika has been preoccupied with cultural critique (lol - poststructuralism really is where praxis goes to die. I’d recommend Gabriel Rockhil’s articles on the Frankfurt school etc. if you’re deprogramming yourself from this particular cohort) and writing a book, Anarchopac has been preoccupied with writing a book and, well, producing video essays at her glacial pace due to her studies, and Red Plateau (who was the least principled and the least well-read of the three) has dropped off.