Negative news always overtake positive news. Especially in world affairs. And yes, experiencing a time of crises tends to generate a lot of negative news, a lot of tragedies.

Especially for us, Marxists, who understand that there’s a better way to do things, who know that these tragedies could be easily resolved. But we live in a world where the dictatorship of the bourgeoise has dominated, and it’s easy to feel like a solitary voice. It’s equally easy to doubt your own identity.

Being in contact with negative things all the time tends to generate the worst emotions in you. This is what we call toxicity. Sometimes we can’t stop the toxicity of others. But in this case you can stop the toxicity yourself: take a break from world politics. Go and enjoy yourself. Take a walk in the woods. Sit in a park and read a light book. Do things worthwhile and that remind you of who you want to be. Volunteer to help people. Take part in community actions. Balance out the negativity. Seek positive things happening in the world. Find the successes of Marxism, that happen every day all over the world, even at the heart of capitalism, yet they rarely get mentioned.

When you are reinvigorated, when you rediscover your revolutionary optimism, you can turn back on the regular world politics.

I can’t offer you any other advice. I feel by reading you, that you need to hear this and understand that you are not the only one feeling this way. It comes with the “job”. We need to learn how to manage our mental well-being so we do not despair.

I’ll leave you with something I heard from Parenti, quoting Gramci:

“Speak truth to power, mobilise, organise, never be sad, remember what the great Italian communist Antonio Gramsci said: “You have a pessimism of the mind, but an optimism of the will.” You see the worst, you consider the worst, you work against it, but in here [shows the heart], you work for what is freedom, for what is justice, for what is right. It is our destiny, it is our future. The future itself depends upon it.”

PS. If you haven’t seen Yellow Parenti, go find it and watch it. When I’m in a similar state as you, I always find it encouraging.

They’ve destroyed a building. They can’t destroy the man.

"The man I was about to marry was posting bad things about the Germans. So I did the only thing I could and reported him to the Gestapo and the Nazi Party HQ. He is not a citizen, and is a Jew.

I am a victim of sexual assault, and now that I have ruined someone else’s life, I hope I’ll feel nicer. AITA?"

The US are either trying to stir the pot and get a civil war going, or they really cut a deal with Rodriguez and she’s just playing her part in consolidating power then selling off.

I’d rather believe the former, than the latter, considering that Rodriguez’s father was “disappeared” by a US puppet regime in Venezuela when she was younger.

Trump has exaggerated or outright lied about the outcome of virtually every military and diplomatic action taken by his administration, since he got inaugurated. He’s desperate for both a personal and a national win. Similarly to the Iranian bombing, he’s done a show of force and is using it to declare victory. He’s likely going to withdraw the fleet from Venezuela’s coast now, and will keep milking “all the beautiful things” he has planned for Venezuela, in the coming months. However, not much else is going to happen. Dissing Corina Machiado probably means he’s not interested in supporting a puppet regime, or he realizes that doing so would be extremely expensive and likely to fail. If the US uses further military force, then the situation will very likely blow up in unexpected ways. Unfortunately, that means that there’s not much hope for releasing Maduro (through diplomacy or war), and he will probably die in a US prison cell, unless China and Russia intervene.

We should be keeping a very close eye on how the Venezuelan government proceeds from now, as that will tell us whether Trump actually cut a deal or not.

Furthermore, we should also be keeping a close eye on what Russia and China will be doing about Venezuela. I find that their responses so far have been slow (to put it mildly) and disappointingly lukewarm. This is not uncharacteristic of them, but I still fear that they might have cut a deal with Trump, especially in exchange for Ukraine and Taiwan.

Although, the night before Maduro was kidnapped, he was meeting at the presidential palace with Chinese delegates, so I’m much less inclined to believe that China cut a deal with Trump, compared to Russia.

I wouldn’t discount this as a false flag outright. I have no idea.

But the Ukrainian command are very interested in any sort of cheap stunt that can score them huge media points, especially before or during meetings with Western leaders. It’s not outside their usual MO. If the Ukrainians did it, and they keep true to form, like in previous events, then they’ll claim responsibility in Ukrainian media, right around the time the story starts dying down in western media.

Judging from who can gain from this, I’d say Ukraine has a lot more to gain than Russia.

Russia isn’t interested in dropping Oreshniks in Ukraine. Any damage they cause is damage they’ll end up paying for one way or another, and any Ukrainian civilian they kill, is less support from their relatives and friends for whatever peace they enforce on Ukraine. Russia is winning, Ukraine can do nothing about it. There’s no reason to escalate the war as far as Russia is concerned.

On the other hand, Ukraine has been trying for some time now to provoke Russia into precisely the kind of action you speculate about. They want Russia to get angry and do something outrageously vindictive, so EU armies (and perhaps US too) will have an excuse to deploy. Ukraine knows that its best hope right now is that either NATO intervenes and wins Ukraine back for them, or NATO intervenes and there’s an indefinite treaty-less ceasefire (and then hope that Ukraine can re-occupy lost territory in the next war, after they get refurbished and resupplied). They also need desperate morale boosters, both for their army and the civilian population. And at the very least they need the West to keep its attention on Ukraine, and for the West to believe that Ukraine is still capable of punching back, so they can keep getting funds (for the corrupt oligarchs) and arms (for the neo-Nazis) and some other stuff (for the people doing the actual fighting).

Every drone attack Ukraine has performed over the last year has been for these exact purposes. And every time, they came out after the fact to take responsibility (as a last attempt to rile up Russia, when Russia wasn’t biting, and to give their people the aforementioned morale booster). We’ve been through this multiple times: The Kremlin attack, the intermittent bombing of apartments in Donbass, Crimea, Rostov and Moscow, the bombing of nuclear-dedicated bombers, the bombing of oil infrastructure, the bombing of Russian freighter ships, the bombing of non-Russian freighter ships heading to Russia, the attempts to bomb Russian nuclear submarines, etc.

Brilliant. Now I know who to blame!

Von the Lying

Read.

Seriously, pick up a book and read it up until you start getting distracted by other things/thoughts. Incorporate that in your daily routine, even if it’s just for a few minutes. After a while, you’ll find out that reading becomes easier and faster for you, and you’ll want to spend more time with a book.

Things that can help:

• don’t set yourself up for failure. You might hear people saying they set a goal for reading 100 books in a year, or some other crazy milestone. You say, great, that’s what I’ll do too, then you realize it’s unachievable and quit. Instead set a goal to read for like 1 hour per week, or get through 1 chapter per day, or read 10 pages a day. You just need to be consistent, you don’t have to go in hard. Also, don’t make yourself reading lists or start with big book series. Just pick up something interesting, and when you are done (whenever that point comes), pick up something else that’s interesting, etc.

• don’t stick with reading a book to the end. If you don’t like a book, put it down and start reading something else. Don’t feel guilty about it, even if everyone else says it’s an amazing book. You can always come back to it some other time when you feel it.

• you can start with reading light and entertaining books, such as fiction, as that is generally easy to get into, particularly if the book is a short novel, or has a flowing and simple writing style. Short story collections can be even more convenient, as you can set yourself the goal of reading one per day, which is easily achievable and doesn’t require much time commitment. Sherlock Holmes compendiums are pretty good for this kind of reading.

• find ways to include books in your routine. Like reading for a few minutes before bed, or taking a book with you in the pooper. You can also listen to audiobooks while commuting to work or doing house chores.

• avoid going straight to the “classics” and instead read things you know you’ll like and be engrossed by.

• reading is like a muscle. It gets better with practice. It gets weaker with neglect. Working it is harder at first, then becomes easier with training.

Hey sorry, for the late reply. I think the other comments pretty much cover what I was going to suggest and more.

Are you interested in something in particular though? e.g. News analysis, casual discussions, in-depth discussions, theory?

He’s pretty good when it comes to spreading the message. I used to watch his monthly “economic updates” and he was well-informed, entertaining and a decent analyst. I think he can be very convincing to the average non-communist Westerner. He’s been pushing the idea of creating worker co-ops a lot, and his organization is pretty good at offering help to unionize as far as I can tell.

He gets criticism from communists because:

• One of his main talking points is that AES (Soviet Union, China, etc) are not really socialism/communism and are instead state capitalist. According to him, it wasn’t for lack of trying, but because their economic, political and diplomatic issues were so extreme after their revolutions, that they had to stop the transition to stabilize, but never restarted again. As far as I can tell, he still supports their existence, and maybe I can see his reasoning, but it’s a vast oversimplification and very close to revisionism (if not there already). His support for China has grown a lot in more recent years, as he sees that the their economic model is similar to the one he espouses.

• Similar to above, his books receive criticism that they misrepresent with multiple errors how AES economic systems worked/work. His own proposals, when written in detail and a more academic way, seem to rile people up about his perceived misunderstandings.

• His constant push for an anarchosyndicalist economic model might harm the perception of future Marxists towards ML.

I haven’t listened to him much in recent years, but I honestly find some of this criticism to be a bit harsh. I think at least to some degree it is a part of his strategy (as he occasionally brings up the point indirectly), in that he won’t be listened to by the average American/West European if he starts outright praising the Communist Manifesto, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc etc.

His important contribution is how many people he’s converted to leftists over the years. Whether they end up being anarchists, anarchosyndicalist, social democrats, democratic socialists, or whatever else is immaterial, as they usually trickle into Marxism-Leninism over time (at least judging from my experience lurking in online communities connected to him for a while, sometime ago). I consider him one of the currently best stepping stones towards Marxism.

Don’t forget articles citing each other as sources

Yet again Germany is stabbing France

In greek it’s pronounced Astee, Αστοί. Has nothing to do with burgers :P

I would recommend Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin. It does a very good job in outlining the economic situation of Europe before the war, as well as the economics of colonialism.

A more focused (and easier to read) book is The Crimes of British Imperialism.

Critical question, how much are they into reading history? On a scale from Youtube video to academic essay?

There’s been a massive decades-long project by the Israeli state and education/science institutions to appropriate the bronze and iron age history of the area and call it “Ancient Israeli” history. The people who lived in that area had very little in common with the classical-era Kingdom of Judea, which was a client-state of the Romans.

They use the Torah (Old Testament) as a primary source to connect archaeological sites found in the area with a supposed unified Israel Kingdom that ruled the area and that was 100% Jewish. For example, they find Assyrian jewelry near Lebanon, they baptize the Assyrian script as “close to ancient Israeli language”, then they paint the map of their ancient Kingdom just a bit further north. They find Babylonian ruins. They claim it’s an Israeli trading outpost, then paint the map a bit further east. And so on.

There’s also a narrative being constructed that the Arabs were the ones to colonize this area after the fall of the Roman Empire and the protections it extended to the Kingdom of Judea.

In essence, Israelis are twisting history around to fit their own sinister narratives aimed at continuing Western support to Israel. It’s very weird to see a Zionist admit to this fact. But it all goes back to normal when they claim that pointing things like that out is antisemitic.

Like other countries in the area, relations eith the US are an ideological position probably.

North Macedonia aspires to join NATO and has a very right-wing and anti-communist government. They’ve been wanting to buy weapons from the US for some time now too. Small countries usually will take advantage of these votes to signal the US that they want to get closer relations. Essentially good ol’ boot licking

The 2 guys holding the rope at the front. There couldn’t be a better picture to describe hope, friendship and good times.

So it begins