SoyViking

It's a red flag with a steam train on it. How cool is that?

The picture is from a recent visit to a railway museum where they had an exhibit about the cold war. Being written by western libs the text next to the flag talked about how civil defence at places like the railway workshops was complicated when "everybody didn't agree on who the enemy was" and called the communists a "fifth column". Apparently, as all workers had to take part in civil defence still and know about plans in case of war, authorities were worried that the large communist presence at the workshop meant that they would tell the USSR about the plans or use their knowledge to sabotage the railways in case of war.

I know this makes me a lib, I just think it stands for better values.

Crime and punishment fills the media people consume and especially the extraordinary hearings cases captivates the public mind, promoting fear of crime and ultimately legitimising the bourgeois police state.

In such an ideological environment leftist positions such as prison and police abolition, rehabilitation and conflict resolution ends up feeling weak and out of touch to most people, despite being the correct responses.

Telling people how fears over crime are most often not rooted in reality comes off as arrogant and as avoiding the issue. Nobody likes to be told that their emotions are invalid and when you're afraid that the new Boston strangler is coming for you, you're not interested in hearing about how unlikely you are to get killed, you're interested in being reassured that you will be kept safe and that the monster will be stopped.

Leftist responses to crime often lacks the immediate commonsense appeal that reactionary positions has playing on their ideological home turf. Most people thinks cops are here to protect you, most people think that criminals are ontologically evil, most people think that the way to stop crime is by putting criminals throughout the carceral state. In such an environment responding to the latest crime panic with more cops and more violence will feel like the appropriate and effective thing to do while things like abolishing the police will seems outright deranged and divorced from reality.

In a future where the left somehow gains access to loyal mass media coverage of its own things might be different but for now leftist agitation has to deal with the fact that we have to get through many layers of bourgeois ideology before we can make an argument. Crime and punishment has proven very effective vectors for the bourgeoisie state to legitimise itself skiing the proletariat and as such the left should get better at talking with people about it.

I work in tech. I like the work itself and my coworkers are all nice and polite people. But their views on politics, economics and the world in general is complete dogshit.

Elon Musk? The world's biggest brain genius. Demanding fees for healthcare? Very reasonable and necessary. Inheritance tax? An unspeakable injustice. Jordan Peterson? An insightful intellectual. Learning a second foreign language in school? Waste of time when you could have programming classes instead. Learning ancient history in high school? Stupid and useless when you already know you want to work in tech. STEM? The pinnacle of prestigious human knowledge. Humanities? A ridiculous and useless waste of time. Trades? Probably okay if you're too stupid to do something better. Unions? Outdated and useless. Arts? Does not compute.

All they seem to care about is learning how to code, getting a job or starting a business and succeeding at that by being a lone Randian superman. They have no sense of broader solidarity or for the existence of something of value beyond the hamster wheel of the grindset.

I think these people are a product of an educational system that is set up to produce good employees rather than good citizens. University level education will include a few token classes on broader subjects like history or philosophy but staff and students treats them like something to get over with so you can do the important stuff rather than something of importance. And you can hardly blame them, the dog eat dog world of capitalism doesn't reward an engineer for writing sonnets or knowing labour history and consequently students focus their attention on learning stuff that will make them less likely to end up on the bottom of the hierarchy.

In essence generations has been raised to be very skilled in a few practical technical fields while being completely illiterate about everything else.

How do you deal with these people in daily life? With their idiotic reactionary beliefs and their stubborn refusal to acknowledge any form of culture beyond the handful of IP rights white western cishet males are expected to enjoy?

And how do we prevent STEM lord bullshit under socialism?

:USSR:

Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois "socialism always fails" propaganda.

On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:

• The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
• The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
• The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don't know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my "Things in history I wish would have turned out differently" list.
• Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn't be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
• The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn't like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn't be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
• The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
• A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.

I'm on concerta for ADHD and it works pretty good for me. It's no miracle cure but I feel a lot better compared to the time before I took them. I'm more focused, less tired, less depressed etc.

But there's one thing that bugs me. It has reduced my sex drive a lot. It's not that I had a ton of sex before, mental health, the logistics of being a family with children and medical issues got (and still gets) in the way. But at least I was horny.

Now? There's almost no horny left, and I miss it. And even when I do get horny it is a lot harder to get physically excited, sometimes impossible.

It sucks. I like the meds for making my life bearable and I hate the idea of having to ask for new meds, finding the right dose etc. Dexamphetamine and lisdexamphetamine are also several times more expensive.

Is this a problem other people have? How do you deal with it?

I don't want :volcel-judge: to win this one.

Online recipes are such bullshit. You have to wade through an endless amount of filler text, video crap, sponsor fluffing and ads before you get to the actual recipe hidden at the bottom of the page.

Everything is designed to maximize SEO and make you click shitty ads. Capitalism ruins everything it touches.

I have depressive tendencies and being a leftist doesn't make it any better.

As a leftist today you live in a world that is fundamentally unjust but you are one of the few people who actually sees it as injustice and not just the way things are. And everyone from politicians and media are constantly gaslighting you into thinking things are fair and just.

As a leftist you believe in a widely unpopular ideology. Stating your honest, well-argued opinion on political matters is more likely to draw extreme anger or condescending dismissal than anything resembling a serious response.

And the hopes of things ever changing are grim. The bleak reality is that a lot of people holds crypto-fascist beliefs and cheer poverty, police brutality and racial discrimination. — The only "serious" opponents to the chuds are feckless liberals who will fundamentally do nothing to stop the right and who will make a much more concentrated effort fighting the left.

And things are getting worse. Look at how chuddy things were five years ago compared to today. We are accelerating downhill.

Goddammit — I just want to live in a world where I'm not considered a freak and subjected to accuse just for thinking we shouldn't be assholes to people.

I'm not saying we should stop being leftists. The truth doesn't become any less true just because believing a lie would be easier. But we should be aware of the isolation and melancholy that goes with being where we are today and work to find methods of supporting each other.