I think Malema was talking more in principle rather than in terms of practical need

That “bloated capitalist system” is making a mockery of NATO, they must succeed in this war

I think Malema was talking more in principle rather than in terms of practical need

We ain’t gonna get there by singing kumbaya

I’ve had a rough few weeks and a lot of self-reflection in that time. I’m not very good at certain aspects of my job and I feel that I’m just not up to task sometimes despite getting good feedback from my superiors. I’ve spent a lot of time analysing my own cycle of self-hatred and thinking about why I do it to myself. Recently I came across a page on Facebook where this guy makes webcomics talking about the experience of him and others with autism. I saw one comic and found it to be quite relatable which led me to check out more of what this guy was saying. I messaged him and explained my experiences to him throughout my life, he messaged back and we had a lot of discussion about a lot of different things. Suddenly I’m able to re-examine my whole life, all of my social mistakes, my inability to logically process instructions from others at times, the times when I get sensory overload, the way I employ masks in social situations to suit different people in order for me to be as socially acceptable as possible, it all made sense for the first time and I finally felt like I could stop blaming myself for the first time ever since I was like 7, I’m now almost 31. I always considered myself a neurotypical who just has something wrong with them but now I can understand and accept myself as someone who is neurodivergent. I’m a normal zebra and not a strange horse.

I think it’s going to be a long process for me to fully deal with all of this. I feel like right now I’m still letting go of all the negativity I’ve heaped into myself for so long, reliving all these memories and instead of mentally flagellating myself for every mistake I’ve made, I can now just accept that it wasn’t really my fault as it wasn’t fully under control. All the mental self-abuse I subjected myself to never worked anyway. What I think is going to be the next big hurdle is how to start thinking positively about myself. My self-esteem has never been good, I’ve never had an idea of my own self-worth beyond how much other people want me around for whatever reason, be it love, friendship or work. However, I also struggle to internalise positive remarks made about myself as there’s always a cynical voice in the back of my head telling me that people only say nice things to me just to be nice, it’s not sincere and sadly that voice has been proven right too many times in the past. I discuss my issues with my parents and they always try to reinforce to me all the positive aspects of myself that they like but I just can’t truly accept it in myself because in my head it’s like, of course they will say nice things about me because they’re my parents. It’s a real mental conundrum where I’m fully cognisant if a problem in my own head but still unable to fix it. Hopefully with time I’ll have the answers I need.

Understanding Marxism helped the world make sense to me. Understanding autism helped me make sense to me. I hope you’ve finally accepted yourself comrade.

bruh hear me out here, like, what if Jesus was the devil bro

like, he uses magic and shit to make people follow him and believe he’s the son of god but like, what if he was really just Satan because Satan can do all that shit too instead he just leads people away from god into a satanic cult that disguises itself as worshipping god when really they just worship Satan without realising

I used to be really into Harry Potter when I was a kid. I loved the books and the video games. Order of the Phoenix is what ruined it for me. I was so hyped for the new book, pre-ordered it and everything but when I actually read it I was met with some of the most boring storytelling I had ever sat through. It was just mindlessly dragging out the length of the story purely so the book could follow the trend of being bigger than the previous ones but the end result is that you get halfway through it and still nothing substantial had happened with the plot. So much of the story is just the characters going through daily life and wondering where the fuck Hagrid is and after 200 pages of that, I completely lost interest in the entire franchise, I never engaged with the series ever again after that aside from pirating the movies just to get the gist of the plot.

This is the kind of writing tactics I used to use in my English exams in high school to pad out my stories and hit the word count.

On a side note I also fucking loathe Lemony Snicket books for using word salad to pad out shitty uninteresting stories. I remember reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, I got about 20 pages in and realised this whole book was going to be using repetition of character speech and what should frankly be an illegal amount of adjectives just to make it look like an actual story is there.

How do you know it’s not GameShark?

Thanks for reminding me why I’m happy to be banned from Twitter

Stalin only did three things wrong:

1. Recriminalising homosexuality
2. Forcefully deporting ethnic minorities to far-flung reaches of the USSR due to some bat-brained belief that their ethnicities affected their loyalties
3. Not cleansing Baltic states of fascist sympathies

However, Stalin’s success in obliterating Nazis overshadow all of his mistakes and thus his legacy must be upheld.

As a PC gamer I do feel like consoles occupy a useful space for some gamers. I have my PC set up very much like a console but it takes more effort to make it like that. I had to plan the parts I wanted to purchase, make sure my PC had built-in wifi just like consoles do, put the whole system together, install the OS and then set up my OS to boot directly into Steam Big Picture with no login or anything else just so I can immediately interface with my system using my controller and not touching my keyboard or mouse. All of this comes as standard for consoles right out of the box, you just plug it in and you get all of that ease of use straightaway.

Granted PC has its benefits for me since I’m someone who really cares about being able to play older games so I need things like unrestricted emulation and backwards compatibility with older games, these are things I can’t really get on consoles without forking out to purchase games I already own or to play it over a cloud streaming service. However, most gamers aren’t like me in that sense and probably don’t care if their latest PlayStation or Xbox can play the full library of SNES games.

Graphics used to be a big factor in favour of PC gaming but in recent years consoles have really caught up to PCs in offering higher resolutions, smoother frame rates and even ray tracing. To even match latest console performance right now you need dual graphics cards and a liquid cooling system whereas back in the days you could match a console’s performance using a single GPU and stock CPU cooler. Before it was just like putting Lego together but now it’s a lot more complicated and potentially messy.

Consoles also have the benefit of game preservation in that console game discs contain the 1.0 versions of games that can be run off a console without any internet connection whereas you have to engage in piracy to achieve the same thing on PC.

Whilst PCs are definitely still the option of the power gamer, consoles do offer features that a lot of gamers want but would be turned off if they had to deal with the extra steps needed for a PC.

Honestly when you look at the specs of the PS5 you are actually getting a pretty solid general home gaming system for the official asking price. I looked at building an equivalent PC and the cost basically doubled. However this is nothing new, consoles are generally great value for money for their first few years until PC hardware gets cheaper, it’s generally towards the end of a console’s lifespan that PCs start blowing them out of the water in terms of value for money.

Granted the PS5 has basically no exclusives to speak of after almost three years on the market so if you already have a PC capable of playing all the latest multiplats then there’s no point in getting a PS5 but if you’re looking to upgrade your primary home gaming system right now then PS5 is a good deal.

I think at one point I had half of the whole site’s userbase under my “Dickhead” tag

Basically all of Reddit has gone to shit at this point, even SLS on there is modded by trots

I’d prefer they get help but at the same time I don’t trust liberals not to try and foster an environment of total tolerance towards paedos, some of them are already trying to do this with arguments in favour of drawn CP, referring to paedos as “MAPs” or pushing the agenda of “children’s autonomy”. For that reason, I’m happy to maintain paedo-bashing until we have a proletarian state that won’t tolerate liberal bs

Some ITT have suggested the death penalty, I’m personally against the death penalty for any crime purely because the potential for error exists. If you wrongfully imprison someone, you can’t give them back the time they lost but you can compensate them to the point that they can really enjoy what time they have left whereas if you wrongfully kill someone, there’s no way to fix that at all. Even for criminals who cannot be reformed, I think the very least that can be done is to put them to work for the betterment of society and at least have the state use the lives of these people to contribute some good to society.

why do you say that?

I’m not that well educated on the DPRK system but I imagine it to be similar to the reason as to why Xi Jinping removed presidential term limits; there could be factionalist or potential fifth column threats within the WPK which necessitate the consistency of leadership and ideology from one to the next

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here but I still have more on my mind.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked “SJWs” (for lack of a better term). Maybe it’s just me having been raised on 4chan during my teenage years but even now I still look at these kind of people with disdain. Whilst I’m fully on board with fighting for the rights of all kinds of minorities in society, I feel the approach taken by many “SJWs” is needlessly antagonistic towards the wrong people and is also completely devoid of class consciousness.

Reaction should not be tolerated, however this does not necessitate talking down spitefully to everyone who holds reactionary views. Many people are reactionaries not because they have a heart burning with hatred for minorities but because their minds have been twisted by bourgeois propaganda telling them that these people are a threat and can you really blame them? Can any of us here say with confidence that we have never been liberals or reactionaries or have never placed any trust in MSM narratives at any point in our lives? If you can then I commend you for having been raised and guided all throughout your life by such staunchly progressive revolutionaries but the reality for the vast majority of us in the imperial core is simply not like that at all.

Much of the proletariat has been pushed into the arms of the right since this culture wars bullshit began, you can see that reflected in how many “working class” (for lack of a better term, we cannot ignore class divisions) people support Trump whilst many of those people get roundly shat on by “SJWs” who, despite some having minority status themselves, are indeed economically privileged in comparison or “middle class” and I think it’s undeniable that economic privilege trumps every other privilege as money can buy freedom, dignity and respect for any member of any minority group. I know many of us here recognise that “working class” and “middle class” are bourgeois concepts but that still doesn’t dismiss the economic reality that people live under in that a few are at the top, some in the middle and everyone else is at the bottom. Those at the bottom can only look up in scorn. A wealthy trans person is more economically privileged than a poor cishet but would you really tell the cishet that they are the ones who need to “check their privilege” purely because they don’t have a problem with the genitals they were born with?

I also strongly believe that whilst Marxists should always fight for the rights of all oppressed groups, the economic emancipation of the proletariat must absolutely come first and foremost in everything we do to push for change. If economic emancipation takes a backseat, we are no better than single-issue campaigners because we’re just trying to affect change whilst remaining under a system that will continuously frustrate our efforts and create new conflicts and divisions. I also feel that progressive social change under a bourgeois dictatorship only serves to enhance the arguments in favour of bourgeois dictatorships which you see in many liberals. It’s too easy to make shallow takes like “US legalised gay marriage but China still hasn’t, therefore the US is overall more progressive than a socialist country.” (Don’t get me wrong here, as much as I hold disdain for “SJWs” I also hold the same disdain for reactionaries in socialist countries like China who are holding back social change due to “traditional family values” or other assorted piles of horse shit.)

Also, with the economic emancipation of the proletariat and the establishment of a strong proletarian state, this will destroy the structures behind, and effectiveness of, bourgeois propaganda as it will no longer be possible to paint certain groups of people as a threat to your livelihood when your livelihood is guaranteed by the state, bourgeois media orgs are banned and public education sets people on the right path. In such a way, much of the reactionary sentiment currently present in the proletariat should simply fade away into irrelevance.

So I guess my main point is simply that whilst we should not engage in class essentialism, we cannot deny economic reality as many do.