IMO you are caught up in savior narratives and rationalizations. It is OK to take care of yourself. It is OK to not sacrifice everything to gain basically nothing. There is no God to prove yourself to, no Christ to advocate for you, no spot in Heaven to reward you.

As for others, I can say I am overwhelmed and unsatisfied with everything. I cling to what is most important to me. I have already lost a lot in recent months, and I am resolved to not lose anything else. The cacophony of contradictions is overwhelming, and if others cannot quiet themselves enough to hear it all, then they are compromised, but most of all I just need people to oppose and face imperialism in whatever domain they are in. For some reason this seems to be the one thing people won’t face, and instead they exploit subordinate contradictions so they don’t have to prioritize imperialism.

You don’t need to be loved to be capable of being a force for good imo.

Is this not a justification to harm yourself for nothing? I think the ruling class currently believes this and they do whatever they want with no connection to anyone but their own power. Good is fundamentally subjective, but the love from others is a necessary grounding force that gives it meaning. Love builds the consent needed to imagine collective futures and the accountability needed to set them in motion.

I’m not saying this to tell you to get connected to the real world, or to touch grass and make more likeminded friends, or to stop feeling the way you do. I’m saying this to say you need to take care of yourself and love yourself in dark times. I do care about you and people like you. Your mind and your will and your desires. Your hatred and malice for evil. I also have a lot of love for other autistic people that just can’t fucking take this shit anymore. A person like you is far more valuable to me than whatever reward you would trade yourself for in the face of loneliness and darkness. You are a pearl and you must not cast yourself before swine just for a fleeting sense of belonging in a world we do not belong in. Not everyone is on our side and it isn’t our fault. If graves are to be defaced, let it be all of ours.

There’s plenty of human rights enjoyers in the liberal crowd who I could bait into supporting socialism

This is too bold of a claim to take at face value or incorporate into a strategy. I don’t think it’s very true either. Rights are already a liberal trap for those who want emancipation, liberation, or revolution to be re-colonized by the imperial state. Liberals believe in rights because it is a system that uses the ills of imperialism to justify said imperial system. If a socialist told me they were using this strategy with success, I would assume nothing beyond their labor being co-opted by empire.

IMO this is a fundamental problem, and it indeed rings true that communists need to be quite honest about everything we say about what we believe. Especially when engaging with things that are ostensibly agreeable between communists and liberals. We do not have an advantage on this terrain, and we must differentiate ourselves or else we will lose ourselves.

Deception is not our chief weapon against the ruling class either. Our weapon is realizing and actualizing that we don’t need to appeal to any power but our own, and with that power we can have our way with the world. I believe this power will not grow by trying to trick liberals into being communists.

This shit is so rancid. I’ve got “friends” who call themselves Iranian feminists pleasing for a rapist to save Iranian women. Truly the most undignified fucking position I’ve ever heard in my life. But no, it’s the privileged American that heard stories of their father’s war crimes who is obviously wrong.

That is a big part of it.

But also how “puritans” are this supreme scapegoat historically that supposedly explains a wide range of American behaviors. It is used to leverage sexual politics but it is always clunky at best yet way too confident. I would say few Americans actually have puritan heritage.

The other part is personal. I have had a very specific relationship with Christianity and grew up in a hard-line family. Since living on the west coast I find that many ex-christians and Christians are completely dumbfounded by my experiences while I am dumbfounded by their severe lack of knowledge on Christianity, the Bible, varying doctrines etc. Christians here are not, in my personal view, Christian at all. And most ex-christians who tell me their experiences have almost nothing in common with mine.

So generally when “puritans” come up, I anticipate nonsense.

I doubt you think so.

Why won’t they just ban it?

Americans won’t save you. Get over it.

If you want to stay in the nursery and cry that no one will play pretend with you, then go ahead. I don’t care.

You can just use it’s actual fucking names given to it by Indigenous Nations before English ever existed.

If you are so baffled as to why your big brain advice isn’t helping then why don’t you have the sense to meaningfully adjust your expectations?

I always laugh at this line. What does that make Maduro? What does it make the USSR? What of the hundreds of colonized nations?

Victims of a mere paper tiger, I suppose.

Do you really know what we need a spine for? All we do is waste away “organizing” over bullshit. Uninspired, insipid fucking protests, milquetoast bargaining meetings, blah blah blah mutual aid drama drama tenderqueer drama. We aren’t going to save anyone from anything. Not ourselves and not anyone abroad. We will exploit and betray our own sympathies, nothing more. Do not make the error of blaming imperial citizens for not defeating their own champions. We aren’t going to be guilted into dismantling our empire. Do you not know the mountain of skulls we had to pile just to lay it’s foundation? We have only begun to destroy the world as nothing but a paper tiger.

No.

As does using an Italian’s name for the inhabitants of this continent. America is most certainly not a continent. It is a colonial project.

I usually respond to the propaganda by pointing out that the vast majority of my fellow imperial citizens are disagreeable and ignorant at best, sinister at worst, sometimes profoundly so. Most of my fellow workers and students that have visas to be are actually quite privileged, other than the clear dangers of being a non citizen. It’s impossible for them to hide their wealth even as they involve themselves with our union. They still try to hide the fact that they grew up with servants back home, or receive considerable funding from their government on top of our union faught wages.

So what am I trying to say here? Basically, I don’t care if there are Venezuelans that are glad Maduro was kidnapped. Not everyone has good opinions and no one is worth listening to based solely on their nationality.

I have my own politics. If I can best synergize with Venzualans that are in support of Maduro, or more specifically, are against imperialism, that would be ideal. But not everyone is my friend.

I won’t back down from my own politics just because someone disagrees. It does nothing for me or anyone I care about to demonize Maduro, regardless of his faults.

No. Killing and hurting animals is not bad for humans. Rather, killing and hurting animals with improper methods and ethics will invariably encourage harmful outcomes. These outcomes will not manifest with even distribution across humanity, other animals, and other life forms. It’s sad you are so disconnected from reality that you are so confident making infantile statements that are easily dismissed. You may as well start a religion that condemns the climate itself instead of addressing the causes and dangers of climate change.

And while I’m here I’ll just add … stop separating humanity from the rest of the biosphere so casually. Are you so arrogant to believe other life forms are blameless or even without ethics? Vegans treat “animals” the same way Mormons treat Indigenous Peoples as “Lamanites” that are simultaneously purer than but still lessor than and in need of “salvation.” You use other life forms as tokens just as all colonial religions do.

Stop making imperialists out to be bumbling fools. Are you Venezuelan? Why don’t you risk YOUR life, why don’t I risk MINE, and we both stop worrying about Latam? It’s always some other calf on the alter while we typetypetype online as if there are no stakes for us.

Why did you leave out the Yemeni death toll? Probably because Venezuelans have nothing to worry about, right?

Honestly it makes me so fucking depressed when I hear people saying something as fundamentally disconnected from reality, something so needless and unthinking, something so flavorless and insipid as even ironically implying Gates is one of the “better” ones, that “as a person” he may be fine and that no one is “defending him.”

Doom is certainly not our inevitable future but it is where we are going given our direction. Perpetual deterioration is its own doom. Drowning in discourse is its own doom.

I don’t believe people actually think we are fucked. I don’t think they believe we are doomed. No one even knows what that means. I think denial is far more palpable than any other sentiment. And I would say helplessness is more potent than doom as well. People that understand the problem are drowned out by denial, not doom. Far too many still hold faith in traditional avenues for me to believe doomerism is anything but disingenuous.

My issue with the fantasy (civil war/ww3) is that it can not mean anything positive. These are ungrounded fantastic scenarios where we can’t hope to take a meaningful victory. We can only hope to continue our cause and protect our communities to the degree we can prepare and organize ourselves.

My faith is shaken. I wouldn’t involve myself with a big tent unless I wanted to torture myself further. I don’t care about the interests of imperial parasites and those are the ones that are protected by a big tent. We need to take our gloves off.

We have stopped believing in self criticism.

Exactly! And things are only getting more dire. I remember at one point years back it became taboo to even discuss his wealth.