Reading for an exam and the author just states:

the structuralist thinking of Marx and Durkheim, for example, operates within a largely positivistic framework.

Seriously, the more of these mainstream academia books I read the more I feel like none of these people have actually spent any real time reading Marx or trying to understand marxist theory.

On positivism and Marxism from my other self-appointed readings

No point to this post really, I just feel increasingly disillusioned about my ability to ever write a Marxist dissertation in Western academia, one that would actually pass. There aren't even anyone to teach me or guide me in it in my field, the most Marxist guy I've found is firmly a Frankfurt school type.

Reposting my bloomer post here with mine and other comrades messages from/about the future.

I am really enjoying thinking about this. So if anyone has a story they want to tell, please do.

This post was genuinely inspired by the post about adult pacifiers that was posted on the site some days ago. Some background, long post:

I started smoking on and off at fourth grade, the first drag and I was like "omg this makes me feel so good", it never tasted bad to me. Then come middle school and age 13 I started to truly smoke and kept going for 20ish years straight. At the end I was almost a two packs a day person running fully on extremely hard exercise, nicotine and caffeine. Ngl it never felt bad, the opposite really and my ability to function was pretty good plus the smoking gave me the social out and the ability to relax that I needed.

Then vapes became available online and as I had always assumed smoking to be an oral plus a fidgeting thing for me, I decided to try that. I left my pack of smokes unfinished the day I got the vape and been doing that ever since, over ten years now. I've only fallen off the wagon once for three months or so after the first covid years and in hindsight I think it was me dropping the nicotine amount too low as it was a time when gicarette smoke started to suddenly smell good to me again. I hated the smell from the moment I started vaping and hate it again now that I raised the nicotine level back to what it was.

I am self-diagnosed audhd and currently don't have access to a diagnosis, my employment healtcare deems it unnecessary as I am currently "performing" well. I get that medication would probably help, but it isn't an option. I've made my peace with the fact that I self-medicate with nicotine and it probably harms me, but am increasingly worried about dragging stuff into my lungs all day long.

So as I think this is an oral + lung + hand stim along with a nicotine thing, I am wondering if anyone here has found something sort of like smoking, but not vaping, that could replace it as a stim? Fidget spinners or such don't work for me. I am thinking the sucking and mouth touching is needed, as weird as it maybe sounds. Hello Freud, I was bottle fed as a baby :D (bad joke).

Considering trying nicotine pouches and something, but I've no idea what that something could be. Thoughts?

"What are we, a bunch of commies?"

Yay, a small win. Time to punch left.

A Western person shared this "bombshell" Shein video to me and maybe I'm dumb, but the conditions look pretty ok to me considering the industry?

It has the ominous music and all the commentators send her wishes for "being safe" in true racist westoid fashion. I kept looking to see some grave bad conditions, but only thing she has there is uncited and unverified text next to pictures about the warehouses that don't seem any different to something like Amazon.

I am not saying fast fashion is good, but at the end of the video she concludes that maybe these working conditions are behind the manufacturing boom in China, so the video has a pretty clear propaganda angle. I am also not saying there isn't issues with labor rights in China, just like everywhere.

But do a video of a sewing factory in Portugal next? Or one of the places in the Med where immigrants do farm labor. Or let's talk about how berry pickers were basically trafficked in wholesome Nordic country Finland and forced to live in inhumane conditions and never got paid.

The youtuber has other videos about "how to get rich". This one has a million views in two weeks, she clearly found her angle for getting rich on grifting for the West.

Freedom = capitalism

Democracy = capitalism

Public opinion = opinion of capitalists

So this person on the longcovid sub is a pretty perfect example of the individualist neoliberal self-governing human who thinks they have all this agency and power because they can throw money at the problem. (Afaik if longcovid does heal, it tends to just do that with rest and time. It is very possible that all this money and effort has done nothing.)

I also find the tech broyi decoding style of the post very annoying. It's just so

Imagine coming to a space where disabled, unemployed and sick folks look for solidarity to flex your 50k spent on treatments, after saying you were just able to stop working, just like that.

And saying that 50k was no biggie as you want to "prioritize your health". Right, like the person with no sick days left, working two jobs with kids who is still not making it, does not?

So this here is a perfect example of the brainworms that Finnish people walk around with.

Imagine having the guts to say this about the Karelian peoples that were indeed very much put into camps and killed during the war, by the Finns (nazis).

What even are "Finnish Karelians"? Maybe he means the basic finn kulaks and colonizers that the Soviets showed the door to? The ones that had spent decades in the area trying to finlandize the people, disappear their language and steal all their natural resources. The Nazi in chief Mannerheim famously lead little warring parties into the area all the way at the beginning of the century.

With everything going on in the US I am seeing more and more of these takes by Mastodons anarchists and I once again fail to understand how their alternative would work. Especially coming out of an intensively individualized system like capitalism, how do you just do no hiearchies? And why is the State always just the cops and military, would someone think about the infrastructure, hospitals, schools...

I am biased, because I am most definitely a statist. Mainly because I have studied them and work in the public sector. It is surprisingly a lot that goes into seemingly mundane things like city planning or the planning and implementation of services of any kind, you do need experts for it. Even in luxury space communism, someone is going to have to steer the ship and design it.

I don't know, from real life experience I know that when for example there is an emergency, people do self-organize. But at the same time I have not once experienced this happening without a hierarchy forming almost instantly.

In my everyday I meet a lot of folks who suffer from substance use issues and what bothers me is how little I know about where these modern substances actually come from and who is making/trading them. The reason I wish to understand this is the way I think drug trade is tied to capitalist exploitation and hightens it on all levels. The way these substances make people vulnerable to be exploited is the end of this that I see every day, but I never see the other end.

I am talking about stuff like alpha-pvp that does incredible harm to people and seems very potent. Every search I do leads me to Western articles that blame China or name China as the origin of these. But is it really?

If there us any good non-propagandized sources you could share, I would really appreciate that.

The one thing about my neurotype that bothers me sometimes is my night owlness.

If I have no mandated early morning thing I will not go to sleep. Despite my best intentions to do that. Just today I had a free day, but had a morning appointment and by noon I was amazed at *all the day I have left *because I got up sooner.

I love nights. I love the darkness and the solitude, I love how silent it is and how safe and like myself I feel when everyone else is sleeping. And I've always been like this. As a kid I read books in bed until morning, as I grew up I watched whatever was on on tv until the wee hours. There were the gaming years as well and now I browse the internet.

There is no real point to this rant. I suppose it would just be nice to have more time in my freedays, but I also don't want to give up my nights of solitude or patholozise what I have always been like.