I think the difficulty and motivation are related. A lot of cool, creative things I want to do are difficult. Not just to be the best or professional at them, but often to even get any personal value out of it. I might want to play guitar, but it’s not really fun to just randomly strum and not get any music out of it, so before I can even get that basic enjoyment out of it, I need to spend a lot of time being bad to learn and practice. And that takes a LOT of motivation. Meanwhile I can get moderate enjoyment out of something simple like watching a show or playing a game I’m already familiar with without much effort or uncertainty, but there’s kind of a cap on how much I can get out of that.

It also doesn’t help that I have a few of these skill heavy interests and they don’t necessarily overlap in skills. So I have trouble picking anything because all of them take commitment to spend time and effort on uncertain, unfun work, with no guarantee of payoff. How long do I give to something I’m not enjoying before I give it up to try something else? If I do that for all of them I’ll end up not getting to the fun part of any of them. It’s paralyzing.

Car and oil companies?

It’s definitely made my depression worse, but it’s sort of just another example of the thing that makes me depressed in general (aside from the brain juices): We live in a society that’s built around not caring about people. The people in power have so little regard for humanity that they will subject people to unimaginable horrors and cruelty if it means they can keep making a buck. There are tons of regular people who do care, but they’re kept so occupied by their own problems that they don’t have the will to band together to push past the barriers we need to break to help each other. Between stuff like this and the ticking time bomb of climate change, it feels like we’re running out of time while also getting further and further from having the capacity to fight back. And it’s not like I’m above any of this. I have had trouble trying to get involved in stuff because of all my issues and it feels really bad. Having learned more about organizing lately, I’m now pretty convinced that just voting isn’t going to do anything. We NEED to get out into our communities and make connections with people to get things done. Good thing I don’t have crippling social anxiety and autism on top of the depression… hehe.

I’m watching history repeat itself as little more than a spectator… and this might be the last show.

You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don’t fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.

For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you’d think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.

But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.

There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn’t go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn’t go after Obama for any of this because… he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the “democratic process” and Ford pardoned him.

Basically if you’re president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it’s for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.

Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

Idk, sounds to me like it did a good job mimicking humans. :P

I think assuming any issue that affects capitalists is unpopular because it doesn’t win US elections is just ignorant of basically every part of our electoral system, government, media ecosystem, etc. People don’t have that much input and to the extent that they do, they get constantly mislead by the people who have both the means and motive to push their message against popular will or interest.

We have to reckon with THAT problem instead of just incorrectly despairing that people don’t care. That doesn’t get us anywhere.

There is literally only one season of the year where I get to be comfortable: Fall. Winter is too cold. Summer is too hot. I have allergies in the Spring. Fall is just right.

Actually, I didn’t know about this before I looked into it, but that wasn’t the first of it’s kind. Apparently that started with a story called "The Vampyre"from 1819. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre

Huh. I had thought that Vampires were just a metaphor for the nobility. Rich guy who lives in a manor and sucks the life from the common folk to sustain themselves. But I just did some quick searching on that and apparently that’s a (relatively) more recent version of them (1800s), but a version of them existed in earlier Eastern European folklore as basically zombies way before that.

Anyway, I could definitely see a lot of what you’re saying, although from what I can tell, the garlic thing has more to do with medical matters than behavior. The two things I’ve seen are that 1) Garlic is an antiseptic, so it was thought to ward off evil probably because it helped reduce disease. 2) Apparently there is a disease that has garlic intolerance as a symptom. Although it also looks like that’s disputed. It can be hard to nail down stuff like this.

The quick answer is that the Democratic Party isn’t socialist. Socialists work against the interests of capitalists and guess who the Democratic Party takes a lot of money from? The few socialists or democratic socialists that try to run through the Democratic party are fighting an uphill battle and are only doing so mostly because the two party system makes it impossible for 3rd parties to win in most cases.

This has always been the case, but what might cause this confusion is that the Democrats appeared to favor more socially oriented policies in the mid 20th century with The New Deal and The Great Society. But the thing to understand about that is:

• Despite creating some social spending programs, they kept capitalists in power.
• They never stopped doing the other part of capitalism: Imperialism.
• There was a lot of pressure from outside the government. Unions were stronger. The Great Depression was the greatest crisis capitalism had seen up until that point, and the success of communist revolutions in other countries could have shown the American working class a different path forward.

In the 90s, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the power of unions thoroughly gutted, the Democrats under Clinton did a realignment to the right. Clinton famously passed welfare “reform” (read: gutting it) calling it “an end to welfare as we know it.” Clinton entered us into NAFTA, a trade deal that helped facilitate corporations moving production to other countries to exploit cheaper labor. He passed the Crime Bill which is credited with being a huge contributor to mass incarceration. Etc.

Since then Democrats have looked a lot more like Clinton than FDR, and even FDR wasn’t a socialist. So yeah, the people who helped take things away from the working class aren’t super thrilled about someone who wants to take some of that stuff back for us.

To provide a simple historical example without getting into too much of the theory, consider the progression from The New Deal to where we are now. That was about as close as the US got to social democracy and that’s been all but destroyed over the following decades by capitalists. But yeah they should definitely read more if they want to understand the mechanisms in more detail.

My sleep has been all over the place over the years. There have been times when I couldn’t fall asleep and even now I tend not to go to bed until like 2-3 AM. I also tend to wake up pretty early relative to how much sleep I end up with. In school I’d have an alarm set so that I could get up for class and I’d regularly wake up before the alarm even when I definitely didn’t get enough sleep.

I actually had doctors suggest a sleep study to investigate causes of my depression, but I couldn’t complete the study because the equipment they make you wear to go to sleep is so uncomfortable to me that I couldn’t actually fall asleep while wearing it. So we gave up on that.

I never particularly feel well rested, but it’s a chicken and egg situation. Am I tired because I’m depressed or am I depressed because I’m tired?

Then later I learned about the autism and lately I’ve suspected that I might also be ADHD, but still waiting on my appointment to actually figure that out.

This is just a depressing cycle I go through. It takes me a long time to find something I’m interested enough in to get over the hump of starting anything -> I spend way too much time and thought on it to the exclusion of other things -> I finish it or get burned out on it if it’s something I can’t finish -> Go back to being depressed at not having anything to occupy me and feel too u motivated to even start stuff that I might have had on the back burner before. -> Repeat

But numbers are also text

It’s not really about defending the bad stuff. It’s about trying to get some more nuance on perhaps the most propagandized topic of the 20th century.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions to have about the various failings of these countries amongst other leftists who have the relevant context as a starting point for a reasonable discussion.

But when talking to libs/conservatives, they’re coming into the conversation with an already extremely warped, un-nuanced perspective. “These are all evil dictatorships that were also super incompetent and that shows why communism is bad.”

Some of the stuff they base this on is either exaggerated or just straight up wrong. Some of it is completely valid criticism, but without the context to understand the issue or provide a useful critique.

How do you have any meaningful conversation about these countries without acknowledging things like:

• All of these countries were previously agrarian, un-democratic societies.
• Most of them were formerly exploited colonies who had to fight fairly brutal wars for their independence.
• Even after leaving, the imperialists kept messing with them through economic and diplomatic isolation and espionage including supporting right wing coups.

We don’t have the counterfactual where we see what these countries would have turned out like without these challenges, but it’s an incomplete analysis to not at least consider the ways which they impacted both their economic success and their political developments. Maybe you could argue there were better ways to respond to all of this, but hindsight is 20-20.

No actual leftists want to have to argue “authoritarianism was good actually.” But it’s hard for the conversation not to appear that way when we’re arguing with people who’ve been conditioned to think they’re somehow as bad or worse than Nazis and ending the thought there.

Is this the work of the mysterious hacker 4 chan?

I’m not talking about personal actions. I personally believe in equality and I wish I could do more about that even if there are all sorts of personal reasons that’s difficult for me.

Corporations don’t believe anything. They’re just profit optimizing machines. They were doing rainbow capitalism when they thought it would be more profitable and now that they think the opposite is more profitable, they’ll do that. It’s as simple as that and hoping corporations would be allies in a fight for equality was always based on a misunderstanding about power.

It’s not like corporations don’t have power that can resist government action. Look at how effectively they’ve evaded taxes and regulations. The big international ones can threaten to take their ball and leave if they don’t like a country’s policies. And that’s when they don’t just bribe politicians to change them.

The workers at those companies are people though. Labor organizing was always going to be necessary to build up power for change. Not saying it’s easy and I can’t fault someone for worrying about losing their job, but if resistance was going to happen anywhere that’s where it would be. Not in boardrooms or alone in a booth.

But there’s the difference. It’s one thing to have convictions but not the means or courage to act on them. It’s another thing to have power, but lack convictions beyond whatever is currently convenient. The former could overcome those obstacles given the right circumstances. The latter never will.

It’s almost like their support for these issues was never genuine to begin with.

Anyone got a recommendation for an open source alternative to discord? Basically just need voice, text, and screen sharing for a group of friends of like, 5-6 at most on at any time.

Even if I gotta pay to host a server, I’d rather do that than pay discord extortion money to avoid ads while still getting my data stolen.