Comradeship // Freechat

Their account, complete with 1488 in it, is still active though of course.

Just ranting but Jesus fucking Christ social media is beyond repair

Basically, I don't want to be an engineer in the US, but I have no choice but to go to college in the US due to my situation. What would I need to do to take steps toward working abroad? Preferably in China. I can imagine learning Chinese is a must, but what about citizenship and other things?

EDIT: Also, what other options you want to suggest?

And it's really based actually.

I did ask on mutual aid on hexbear twice but got no responses.

I'm going through a disability benefit appeal. I've got absolutely no money whatsoever, my overdraft is maxxed out and I'm 5 months in rent arrears, no family to help and the food bank is so difficult and time consuming to access. You get three days worth of food but it takes over a week to access. So every week there's 4 or more days of starvation. Anyway I am absolutely starving. The problem is, I don't dare ask for money in case I get in trouble with the DWP (British benefit nazis) for having a source of income. So would anyone please be able to help me out with food some other way than money? British supermarket gift cards (eg for sainsburys/tesco/asda), a justeat voucher, an amazon voucher so I can order food from amazon pantry, I mean anything at all that isn't actual money? I am so desperate I don't know what to do. I know sainsburys take google pay for giftcards. You don't have to be in the UK to order them.

This is more of a vent than anything but this happened last night and honestly I'm still pretty shaken up and mad over it.

I went out for a walk late last night (about 9:30-10pm) as I normally do when I have a lot on my mind. I was staying with a relative, they live in a decent-ish neighborhood and I have never experienced anything like this here before so it made it even more of a shock that this happened, plus I never go out within a five minute radius of the place of residence at this time of night for safety reasons.

I was walking around the area, was about ten minutes into the walk when I decided to sit on a bench for a breather. This car slowly drives by and approaches a parking space, but then exits it and just... stays right in front of me. I felt pretty uncomfortable and got up from the bench. Then the car started slowly following me.

I was practically shitting myself at that point and began walking faster, the car caught up with me and the driver rolled down the window and asked me if I was alright, saying I look lost, if I live in the area etc. I told him I was fine, that I live nearby. He asked me which house I lived in. I obviously refused to answer and just repeated that I lived nearby (again, a lie but I wasn't telling this creepy man anything about me). He told me that I was lying, that I don't live in the area, and I just repeated that I do and began to walk in the opposite direction. The car kept driving in the direction I was originally walking in and I thought that was it, but then he made a U-turn and continued to follow me.

After that I ran back to my relative's house and immediately locked the door behind. I don't think he saw which house I went into but I've been pretty shaken up since.

Why do creeps have to exist in the world.

A good way to understand the contrast between single-party and multi-party systems is to view single-party states as more socially advanced in certain respects. A multi-party system implies that the society has yet to settle on a unified path forward or a definitive set of societal goals. Various factions within a multi-party system often focus on different issues and hold distinct visions for society.

These systems often face challenges in setting and achieving long-term goals. A government with a limited tenure will find it difficult to implement effective long-term planning. Consequently, these systems are incapable of rapid change, and progress within this framework tends to be incremental. This poses challenges in times of crisis when decisive action is needed.

Conversely, single-party systems often suggest a broader societal consensus regarding overarching goals. The primary function of the party then becomes facilitating progress towards these goals. Debates within single-party systems are focused on optimizing the implementation of agreed-upon goals, rather than fundamentally debating the direction itself. As a result, progress happens more rapidly and efficiently.

He died a few days ago, but his funeral was held today. He is well known for his alleged connection to the 2016 Turkish coup attempt. He is well known to have aided in impeding the leftist movements in Turkey and supporting the Islamist AK Parti in taking power and displacing Turkish secularists. His movement has also been alleged to have received funding from the NED as part of the US's "Green Belt" project, an initiative to prop up Islamist anti-communist governments in the Middle East during the Cold War to counteract the influence of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. He has also been known to pander to Zionists, notably opposing the flotilla delivering aid to besieged Gaza in 2010.

His history and the atrocities linked to him could fill up a book (and there are many books about him), but he's relatively unknown outside of Turkey.

1. They sided against the USSR's correct view that socdems were the moderate wing of fascism

2. They support Ukraine during the Donbass War

3. Elke Kahr, a notable member: a) Distances herself from the USSR and other AES countries b) Says the DotP is an "outdated idea that needs to be broken down"

In conclusion, why does the KPOe keep making so many bad takes

There are some books and long texts that I would like to print since reading on electronic devices is distracting. Anyone of you has does this before?

I remember in college there were talks of how some print shops could print textbooks for you given the pdf but I never had to do that.

Preferably with inbuild VPN. Does not need to be free.

Hello, I'm currently looking for some audiobooks of some of Karl Marx's works.

Is there any place I can find like a single file download of Das Kapital, or any other books you would recommend.

I was able to find a copy that's read by: Malk Williams But I wasn't sure if it was any good or legit.

I tried getting it from marxist.org but all his books are broken into like a bunch of different small files.

Thank you for your help.

Pretty much nothing useful will be in the internet for a few weeks during and after the U.S. elections, just go outside to a park or something, or stay inside and do one of your hobbies, drawing or painting mini figures or writing or the best thing you could do is read some of the books you keep delaying.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6028275

After being extremely annoyed with how Microsoft was trying to force me to use their worthless Outlook programme, and learning that Windows 11 (which they've also been pressuring to try) is polluted with advertising, I decided that it was time to migrate to another operating system. Somebody recommended EndeavourOS to me, and after backing up my valuables and following these instructions, I am finally trying a better operating system.

If I'm being honest, my first impressions are... not good.

One of the first things that I notice is that I can't easily modify the /usr/ directory. I tried to install Java there but the OS would not let me because I lack the permission. How do I get the permission? I don't know. I am guessing that it has something to do with Terminal Emulator, and the fact that I have to use this program so much immediately tells me that this OS was made for programmers in mind, not ordinary users. On Windows, I could click an executable, click a few more buttons and be done with it, but here the OS wants me to mess with a ~~DOS prompt~~ terminal.

Then there is the scaling. I managed to adjust the scaling while keeping the resolution so that everything on my screen didn't look microscopic. The problem is that when I open certain tabs or windows, they stretch out so far that the monitor can only show part of them. Here's a screenshot so that you can see what I mean:

This is just lousy design. I can shrink the window, but not by much.

I want to uninstall a font. How do I do that? Well, I read on the EndeavourOS forum that I need to run 'pacman' (meaning the terminal) to uninstall a font. Nobody elaborated on that. So after entering the terminal, typing 'su', then my password (another annoyance), then entering "pacman -R /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoColorEmoji.ttf", the terminal spits out "error: target not found: /usr/share/fonts/noto/NotoColorEmoji.ttf", even though I am 100% certain that it is there. I would just remove it by simply clicking it and deleting it, except that the OS refuses and tells me "Error removing file: Permission denied".

Speaking of which, I actually find this more annoying than Windows' worthless 'administrator' function. At least I could simply click the administrator function and be done with it. The process here looks much less straightforward.

I want a calendar with scheduling, which is part of the reason that I am quitting Windows. I downloaded the Orage application hence, then I clicked on 'orage-4.18.0.tar.bz2' in my downloads folder. My cursor spins like something is loading, and... nothing happens. I don't even get an error message.

There are some other things that I could mention (where's the color filter?), but these are the worst offenders. I'm not calling it quits on EndeavourOS, and I am sure that eventually I'll get the hang of things, but so far this has been unenjoyable.

I had an account on which I was using my usual low security password for non-sensitive accounts. That password was leaked in the recent attacks on the Internet Archive so I finally went and changed all of them to auto generated ones. I figured I'm probably not the only one on here who had an account to access some of the books that you can only borrow temporarily.

You can check whether your password was leaked on: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

https://cal1.iv.ggtyler.dev/

Is there a list of hexbear communities so i can see if i'm missing something interesting? But it need to be viewable from my grad account, so far everything i tried just leds me to hexbear and i don't want to have a make second account there.

Now, I know some of you are ready to come here and post some horrible fascist subreddits; but that's just too easy. Fascists are everywhere and they converge on all platforms at this point.

In terms of neolibs or radlibs, I genuinely think FluentInFinance meets that criteria as a point between the both. The well-off neolibs with raging hatred for the poor are constantly on there dismantling the "common points of the prole clamoring on twitter" with "facts and economic logic" that's just boils down and condenses into blaming people for their finances, recommending/shilling outright financial services that shouldn't be captured by corporations and generally completely ignoring the material conditions of everything around us.

More often than not they invade other socialist subreddits and literally comment on posts about people struggling on "How to cut 5 dollars out each month and save X so you can invest into X and have at least part of a bed-rock after years of effort and time you could have spent on food!" and ignoring completely that well over 40% of Americans live paycheck-paycheck.

This is made double worse by the sheer amount of lolbertarians and radlibs who worship Hayek and Mises (example above) come down and justify/relinquish in the blood of every act of austerity and death their system and candidates of hand out. It's like a fucking liberal vanguard.

I've been leading the effort for building up a local institution that has been in a "zombie" state of existence for a while.

It's a very small org, not necessarily communist, and even our political parties don't pay much attention to it. It's stressful and sometimes a thankless job. Since we're rebuilding it and have very few people, everything takes way more of my time than it should.

But it's damn satisfying to see how much can be done just by pooling together some working class people, and how much we help the lives of people affected by us, materially or socially. It's made it even more clear to me how mentally unsustainable society has become through individualism.

So this is your regular call to get organised.

You don't need to devote too much of your time to it, because every little bit helps a lot. You also don't need to build something from the ground up, you can join a bigger effort around you. It also doesn't need to be a party chapter (specially if you don't have one near you), it can be other necessary organisations like tenants'/trade/workers'/students' unions, animal rescue groups, homeless shelters, food banks and soup kitchens. Heck, even some churches can often have progressive projects that materially help the working class.

From a theorectical and material perspective, no revolution will come without organised and connected labour with practical experience. But from a personal and subjective view, building up those connections in service of your class and community is something you probably can do in your immediate surroundings and feel in concrete terms what Marxists mean by "organising" and how effective it can be. So it's a win-win scenario.

Been looking at ways to get a super cheap car. GSAAUctions has some neat govt. fleet vehicles and other stuff for less than a thousand dollars on some.

Anything I should know about GSAAuctions? I'm pretty sure the govt. cars aren't criminal asset forfeiture, right?

If I were to successfully bid on something, what is the process on "getting it"? They issue you a certificate and you pay the final bid and go and grab it? Or is there something else I'm missing?

Never done this before...or bidding on anything at all. I hate bidding.

Figured I could get the best recommendations here since most "breadtubers" seem to be fundamentally liberal, milquetoast socdem types. Especially interested in theory, etc. topics like that. The longer the video the better.

It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I'm writing because of my negligence.

So please don't be like me.

This may be unpopular, but I am getting tired of all the questions to enter a space or create an account, not just in the lemmygrad-sphere, but basically every leftist space on the internet.

I wanted to create an account on ProleWiki, but to do so I need to pass an exam.

FIRST SET (please answer all 8 questions)
SECOND SET (choose 5 questions to answer)

I have already answered pretty much the same questions to get on lemmygrad and matrix. If I knew I'd be asked the same things over and over, I would have saved them from the first (or second) time I typed them all out. Mind you, lemmygrad isn't the first place I visited/joined, so I have answered a similar set of questions probably 6-7 times in the past few years.

The biggest problem with the questions is that they don't work. As in, they're not going to filter out any bad actors, because people intent on joining for destructive purposes aren't going to be deterred by a few questions they can answer with a quick google search. Bad actors will also know what answers you expect to see and write those. It's a bit like when the US border control gives you the green form with the question "Are you a terrorist?" But the questions will turn away people like me who are simply tired of writing an exam just to create an account on a webpage.

I have always had problems with tests/exams as in I have a problem they exist and I literally have traumas from them lmao. The pressure, the uncertainty, the doubt... I mean there's a reason people still have anxiety dreams about missing a test or not studying long after they have left school.

By all means, have questions in the signup forms, but:

Fewer questions

Two to three questions max. You don't need theory questions, they can be googled. You don't need LGBTQ questions, that should just be a statement "Here we respect LGBTQ people and their right to exist, use pronouns people ask, don't discriminate, etc. violation of this rule will result in a ban, possibly permanent." Done.

Right kinds of questions

If you want a theory/reading question ask something like: What was the book/article/work that got you into Marxism/communism and why? or What's the most recent work of communist literature (book, article, novel, pamphlet, zine, etc.) that had an impact on you and why?

People will tell you more about themselves by actually talking about themselves rather than answering questions about theory. Not to mention it's harder to fake being a communist when you have to give your own personal understanding of something that's not a big issue. Asking about Palestine, DEI, culture war topics doesn't make sense because again they can look up what you want to hear. But if someone says the most recent work they read is the Capital or Manifesto and they think everyone should be equal then that should raise a red flag (not for being wrong, but for not being genuine).

No wrong kinds of questions

There are some questions you simply shouldn't ask as a matter of principle.

For example, you have this is number 3 of the mandatory questions for ProleWiki: "3. Have you read our principles? Comment your agreements or objections to their points."

Since a person filling this out is only requesting an account, asking for comments on the principles may come across as you simply rejecting anyone who doesn't agree or will want changes. This shouldn't be a question, but a statement: "These are our principles, joining means you agree to them." I don't know how ProleWiki is run if there are meetings where principles are modified/added/removed or if they are set in stone. If set in stone, then it definitely makes no sense to ask.

Questions that are questions, not several questions hidden as one

Asking things is easy, but whoever wrote the questions has no respect for people's time. This is just way too much work, people have things to do. The time spent answering questions could be spent writing an article for the wiki. There's an idea! Instead of answering all those questions, just have a list of topics people can write a wiki article on. That wiki article is the entry form. Simple, elegant, dare I say... beautiful?

What's there now though:

Where did you find ProleWiki from?(1) How familiar are you with it?(2) Comment what made you want to join ProleWiki(3) and what areas you are interested in contributing to.(4)

That is 4 questions.

What current of Marxist thought do you uphold? Describe as thoroughly as needed your path towards your current political perspective.

That is 2 questions, one of them an "essay question".

Have you read our principles? Comment your agreements or objections to their points.

There are ten subheadings in the principles, with more sub-subheadings. That's a question and an essay question. Q: 6 E: 2

What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support the LGBT community?

2 questions.

What is your position on Joseph Stalin(1) and Mao Zedong?(2) How would you describe their historical role?(3,4) Share any comments or critiques you have regarding them.(5)

5 questions.

What are your thoughts on China,(1) Vietnam,(2) Cuba,(3) DPRK(4) and Laos?(5) Do you believe any of these countries is socialist?(6) Why or why not?(7)

7 questions.

What is settler-colonialism,(1) are there any countries that still fit that description(2) and what should be done regarding them?(3) Further, what is to be done about the decolonization and liberation of indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and immigrant groups in your country?(4)

4 questions.

What is your analysis of the situation in Palestine?(1) What do you think of the 2023 October 7 events(2) and the groups involved from both sides of the conflict?(3)

3 questions.

I count 23 regular questions and 2 essay questions. And that's only the "8" mandatory questions.

TL;DR too many questions to get an account (like ProleWiki, lemmygrad, matrix, but other leftist spaces too). ask fewer (2-3) but more poignant questions. rules about LGBTQ and other rules that aren't up for discussion shouldn't be a question but a statement to be accepted or not. answering so many questions is mentally taxing/exhausting.

Made a Lemmy account a week ago and it still hasn't been accepted. I've been desperately itching to get at some libs outside of my sporadic posting. If this has been asked a million times before, sorry; just curious on the current "traffic flow" as of now.

Everytime I'm at a demonstration with a lot of police violence like lots of Palestine demonstration I get very nervous, my heart starts racing, my knees get weak and my breath becomes short. I even get it when watching videos of police violence or when I see SWAT team busses outside of demonstrations. I'm not the only one that feels that way but others that I see at every demonstration deal with it better, I feel like. They can get in the zone better. So do you have tips?

Gotta take care of my mental health. Block anyone who uses "tankie" unironically or talks shit about how communists are le bad. Can't even have a friendship with western anarchists.