Are you perhaps thinking of “buggary” which referred to any “unnatural” sex act. That included all anal sex, sex with animals. Really anything in theory but PIV sex between a man and woman. Not so much a biblical thing as something in western law derived from Christianity.

In different places it’s had different connotations and legal definitions though and in reforms of the western legal code its definition underwent various reforms, some progressive, others not so.

But that has nothing to do with biblical definitions or doctrine from over 5 centuries ago.

Considering the bible has instances of girls (underage) to be taken for the pleasure of conquering men in god’s chosen army and considering it has a payment system and mandatory marriage of rapists to their victims I’m fairly confident that any condemnations of abusing children is merely a way of condemning homosexual man/boy acts which the Romans did practice and not Man/girl for instance.

Christianity going back to verified pre-European (Dead Sea scrolls) sources is a mixture of teachings, many socially reactionary and some progressive. Trying to make it approve of modern understandings of human sexuality (sexuality was seen in terms of acts not of attractions or being born a given way) when it’s so old is not likely to yield success as reactionaries who can read Ancient Greek and Aramaic will have points to score against such attempts.

It depends on what kind of mask. If you’re wearing an N95/KN94 mask then you’re protecting yourself (and if it doesn’t have a valve also others if you happen to have it) by filtering 95/94% of viral particles.

Though I agree it could attract unwanted attention and hassle in some areas. Even in a place like California I’ve been followed around stores for a minute or so for still masking by employees who I guess thought I was there to shoplift but I’ve never been seriously confronted about it. I’ve had a cowardly guy shout from a dozen feet away how I should take it off and some rambling nonsense but I just stared at him and he stormed off, I’ve had a handful of guys tell me it’s a shame I’m wearing it because they’d like to see my “pretty face” (ugh), but most people don’t say anything. I’m sure many anti-maskers resent me but given most of the public has joined them in giving up I think they’re content to just feel smugly superior and say shit behind my back which I can live with.

This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: !covid@hexbear.net

I still wear a mask. I wouldn’t necessarily wear one or keep one on if I was walking around a lightly populated park or down the sidewalk but I would before going into a store or a crowd (even outdoors) or any enclosed space with people like a train or station.

I’m not sure how mask wearing compares by country. In most of Asia it seems like it’s been normalized for decades for people who are feeling ill or have certain conditions to wear the blue cloth medical masks so I doubt in most of Asia it’s a big deal in most situations compared to the west where you have anti-mask reactionary sentiment and ideology that favors individual recklessness rather than responsibility.

There are rumors about lemmygrad as well,

Rumors from the people who were on a website that was an op? That doesn’t seem credible. Anyways there’s always that risk. If you live in the west and post here you shouldn’t post anything that breaks the law under the assumption the admins are literally CIA agents and actively hostile. Now there’s no evidence of this. Dessalines has a long history of being an ML with correct lines on the anti-imperialist struggle on reddit for years before they developed Lemmy and launched this website.

Frankly though there will always be an air of distrust given the history of infiltration and subversion in the west. However, the fact that Dessalines has not tried to ever push reactionary social thought or imperialist positions, the fact they don’t instigate struggle sessions and try and split people up or cause strife and in-fighting are all strong indicators that those who run this website are likely not feds or anti-communist activists (like feds but not paid and no badge or security clearance). That doesn’t mean this website isn’t under surveillance.

The surest way to out glowies is they serve the interests of empire. They were usually find it acceptable to push anti-capitalist positions so long as they also can push at least some pro-empire positions. Things that appeal to liberals, things like the Hong Kong color revolution or Ukraine which they can try and approach from a faux left position of claiming Russia is imperialist. They can bend on things like Gaza where it’s just not possible to do otherwise as even liberals would shame them. If someone consistently takes a correct anti-imperialist line 100% of the time and takes an anti-capitalist line 100% of the time and understands the US is the main issue and espouses this then they are working against the US 100% and the only way to be of utility as an asset in that situation is to engineer splits via struggles over some minor point that they enlarge into a raging flame-war intentionally. Such a person would not seek peace or issue a line and put the discussion off limits but attempt to keep it raging.

Misogyny and patriarchy are so normalized and interwoven with our lives that we’re expected to take minor improvements on an abomination as progress. I feel your pain comrade.

It’s like a slave strike that results in a law for better accommodations and maximum amount of corporal violence that can be used. It’d obviously be an improvement in a vacuum but it’s just making something that shouldn’t exist slightly more comfortable while lessening the ammo those against it have. The solution of course is abolition so anything that perpetuates it, normalizes it, gives it good PR, allows people to live in denial about it or act like it’s okay is frustrating and I must say confusing.

This is just the limits of working with reformism and within capitalism I feel. It does make one want to condemn and step away from the whole thing in disgust as a farce.

And I’ve expressed before these same fears. It’s logical and will happen which is why I’m against normalization. I’m not for criminalizing victims but not for legalizing it either for these reasons.

I do think that there may be a need for re-evaluation of tactics and strategies in the present and in the imperial core but I don’t think this is it.

That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.

This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.

This kind of reminds me of that meme of the academic standing in front of a blackboard with mathematical theorems and for step 2 it has “then a miracle happens” and the other guy standing next to him saying he should elaborate more on what happens there.

Why would the capitalists, having the high-ground, having pre-existing access to power, having built a fortress in terms of superstructure, loyal dogs in the halls of power and violence and so on just allow this to happen instead of using violence, subversive tactics, laws, etc to simply crush the communist led businesses or subvert them in some way either overtly by seizing control or value or through subversion, infiltration, use of the CIA, FBI, etc to poison the movement and turn it against itself, to turn it into a compromised asset of sorts?

They’d murder the true proponents of such thinking and replace them with dishonest businessmen who’d promise the same but keep the keys in their pocket and then pull out the rug on their workers in 10 years time and pocket the value. Which would dispirit others from trying and convince most people it was all just a scam.

They can simply ban the communist parties. Simply ban businesses affiliated with them. Simply take all their assets under a communist control or anti-foreign agents law and then sell them cheaply to competitors at government auction.

Also how would we working within the system be able to out-compete them who have value extracted from the global south via imperialism/neo-colonialism as well as generationally hoarded wealth? By working harder? Exploiting ourselves harder than they can exploit their workers? Than they can exploit desperate climate migrants? I don’t think this is a good plan for privileged westerners under the thumb of a capitalist government. For peoples who’ve lived in absolute poverty, starvation, knowing want and suffering and backwardness for generations sure it’s an easy sell as it was in China when they began industrializing but people tend to want better conditions, not to voluntarily subject themselves to conditions much worse than those of their parents all in the hopes that in some decades not that they’ll be financially secure within capitalism because of work but that they’ll maybe buy it out or overthrow it if they’re not crushed and sabotaged in the meantime. (Hence why they will be sabotaged early and often to dispirit and discourage people)

I mean they could simply levy new huge, punishing taxes across the board then give tax breaks, special exemptions, bail-outs etc to the capitalist controlled enterprises while siphoning the value from the collective enterprises straight to the imperialist machine and handing some of it back to the capitalists while using the rest to continue to fund the global and domestic oppression.

I mean where is the capital for starting to do all this supposed to come from? To start up companies, means of production you need money. People lending a bit of labor and free-time on their weekends isn’t going to create machinery or produce the capital for buildings, staff, etc. When the people who actually have this capital are either PMC type workers who benefit from the continuation of capitalism and would rather not work harder to beat others for an ideological project or the capitalists themselves who’d only fund such a thing to subvert it, pull the rug out and take the profit from all the hard work I just don’t understand how this gets off the ground without foreign interference like China funding it which would get it instantly shut down for foreign communist subversion that’s a threat to national security. Will the liberal compromised unions give us the funds? I think not. The communist parties in the US are either compromised and full of liberals (CPUSA) or still struggling to grow and hardly have the capital and funds for such.

Also I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books about communist parties owning businesses in the US or at least newspapers but it could be expanded.

Your examples:

Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.

The JCP is awful, communist in name only. They follow the imperialist line, attack China, are revisionist, liberal, etc. They’re harmless and a false path which is why they’re allowed. They also as you note are powerless and losing steam. Let’s not say being trots is good, your idea is out-competing capitalists but they’re not competing in the communist newspaper market, trots have had that cornered for decades but have gone nowhere.

Mondragon is simply an exception not a rule, it’s allowed to exist and isn’t in any way working towards buying out and overthrowing capitalism and if it was it would probably have been crushed. Contradictions exist under capitalism and they exist under socialism, they are not proof of anything but that fact itself.

Haier and Huawei exist under the coat and wings of an in-power revolutionary communist party in a nation that’s been ideologically communist for over half a century now. And as you note one of them is being blockaded from the west essentially as part of a push to contain China.

Direct upload of videos is not possible on this instance. I’m not sure lemmy supports it at all. Instead use another site. Whether that’s odysee or a peertube instance or something to host your videos and link the url directly to the video (or the page if unavailable) as your post URL.

It depends on how well vetted your people are. If you let anyone in who checks a box that says “I am a communist” you’ll have professional spammers sign up and spam your community with stuff they’re paid to promote at scale. You’ll also have dishonest liberals, reactionaries, etc all come in and spam their shit because why not.

If it’s actually a tightly moderated space with serious vetting and a willingness to boot people it’s not so bad.

Volume and relevance I think are important. Keeping the amount of promotions for any given blog, shop, videos, etc to an acceptable level where you don’t have 5% of the overall lemmy instance’s comments/posts being promotion which makes people feel like it’s no longer a discussion space but being encroached upon by private commerce.

The types of people who are willing to engage at the worst level to climb to the top of the capitalist system by exploiting themselves and others are likely to have other negative traits. To see people as resources and things not as human beings, to see them as things to exploit to get something from whether that’s sex in this case or money, power, etc.

Yes many of them could use their fame to get laid with adult women, but there are a lot more children for many of them (that seems to be the main audience of youtube for a lot of these big successful streamers, hence their use of that one face that psychology shows gets more kids to click) and as a bonus for these types who see people as things to use, children, teenagers can be manipulated a lot more easily.

A star-struck teenager is going to be a lot more pliable to doing whatever extreme acts you want, to being available, to lavishing the ground you walk on with praise, to unthinkingly defer to whatever you say in conversations, to being a thing to play with as they please than a mature adult woman who has her own life, some perspective, some maturity, can tell when she’s being manipulated or when a guy is putting in nothing and expecting her to do all the work in a relationship.

These guys are not going for teenage girls because they want a healthy, equal relationship built on love and mutual respect that’s stable. They’re going for them because they want to fuck a thing and for that purpose I suppose to these types of men a teenager is as good as a woman because they get off either way and they probably see both as just a set of holes. So misogyny plays a part as well, further reinforcing that people are objects to use for your own benefit but girls and women are especially objects for the use of men without concern for them.

There is something to be said about the sexualization of children, teenagers, etc to be sure as part of it but even without that these guys would be preying on vulnerable young adult women so it’s not like such societal things conjured up this behavior and creep-ness in them.

And the sexualization isn’t just from the perspective of these creep youtubers, it’s from the perspective of the teenage girls/boys who are told to grow up, that sex is maturity and being mature is good, who are trained to sexualize themselves, to get laid, to experience it now now now. They’re simultaneously told that and shamed, not really told what a healthy sexual relationship or relationship looks like, not given real skills to develop their sexuality and explore it in a healthy way by a puritanical culture that says on the one hand everyone should be having sex as soon as you’re in high school if you want to be cool and on the other that sex is bad, you shouldn’t have it, all we’ll tell you is the diseases and pregnancy you can get from it not how to navigate these natural feelings and drives you’re experiencing except through repression. And they’re told that sex is how you get people to like you, sex is how you get praise, showing your nude body is how you get men to lavish you with good feeling words and affection. Many lack impulse control, and frankly in some cases do send nearly unsolicited nudes or flirting to adults they’re head-over-heels infatuated with and offer themselves up to these adults who have no moral compass that tells them to reject such offers as responsible, normal, moral adults would.

It needs to take a back seat to historical and dialectical materialism, to the meeting of people’s needs. It’s not something you can really just debate or logic away nor is it something you can simply crush by outlawing or cracking down on. It’s a historical process just as the rise of monotheistic religions was.

So yes it’s a liberal or reactionary tendency if you’re just saying “religion causes bigotry, without it we’ll have a better world”. Without Marxism atheism is nothing particularly progressive, religion has long been very helpful in upholding reactionary thinking and systems but not strictly necessary as many have been upheld by people who gave it little credit or thought.

I wouldn’t call myself that these days either because of how many reactionaries the space has and because being a Marxist-Leninist is frankly more important and more accurate a description than simply being anti something.

However a point I would make (which has already been made) no one except those severely mentally ill believes that Halo or Call of Duty is real or that not obeying it or a message they think they see in the Matrix will result in them being eternally tortured and injured as opposed to granted eternal bliss. No one thinks those are instructions or commands from an all knowing, all good, benevolent all powerful entity which will save or damn them based off their choices to adhere or not to those messages. Nor are their institutions or systems built around adhering to those messages that date back centuries, nor places where people steeped in the knowledge of the lore of these things study before going out to lecture to the masses about it, nor volumes of works and thousands of lifetimes of humans thinking on it dedicated to it. And on and on.

Warning: Long rambling

I just don’t get people who tolerate them. As someone who’s spent years blocking and avoiding them (arrrr) they just seem unnatural and infuriating but to so many people used to them they’re just an accepted part of life.

Neither Washington nor Moscow was and is a well-honed propaganda strategy employed by the CIA, US State Dept, western media, etc. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re willing to criticize them, they don’t care as long as in the same breath you criticize their enemies, implicitly acknowledge their propaganda, validate their contention that yes, things have been done badly here BUUUT the numbers of death and human rights violations (according to western propaganda) are much higher over there, thus naturally it’s better over here than there. After which comes the next step of dismissal which is “stop whining, things could be worse, be grateful, you have no idea how privileged you are, how dare you attack this great country why do you know in blah blah blah you can’t even blah blah blah?”.

People who say this are not engaging in critical thinking. You criticize the west but do you believe the Chinese media? Do you read their perspectives? If their media is invalid because they abuse human rights, so should the media you read from the west be invalid. Yet this is never the case. It is never the case that such propaganda is examined, subjected to ruthless criticism and introspection with outside the empire perspectives and discarded. Even when there is a history of people calling out problems time and again and being ignored in the moment, do you listen to them in future or breathlessly await the latest piece of China bad news to make you feel slightly better about your problems?

Self-effacing and dishonest acknowledgement with a framing that it’s still the best you’re going to get is not helpful. Acknowledging too little too late and offering worthless words of salve to the victims.

Education and awareness are worthless. The past is the past. It only matters if you learn to prevent it in the present and future. Do you think the dead care about you saying what was done to them is wrong? Do those suffering today from the western military/intelligence actions who you will say you feel sorry about in 10 years care that in 10 years you will be sad and acknowledge the wrong or do they care about you understanding the wrong, spotting it now and speaking up to stop it NOW. Not to deflect, not to “but China worse” their suffering.

Look no further than many of those mindlessly defending “isreal” and their genocide. There are many among them who understand the holocaust, who know the history all too well. Yet they didn’t take away the right lessons, they took away that it was bad it happened to Jews but it’s good when it happens to Palestinians who are deserving. They take away something that’s frozen, disconnected, it gives them no analytical power to prevent the next atrocity unless it’s exactly like the last.

This kind of thinking is never accompanied by an honest assessment that one can’t really impact the process in China, the problems in China. All one can do is assist aggression by powers that have historically, time and again done bad things (often to the very same countries these accusations are against).

Is it not proper to clean one’s own yard first before screaming at your neighbor and going to knock down their fence to try and force them to fix their yard? Yet the priority is always on their yard, on the soothing balm, the salve that at least you live in a less bad place than those savages in China, Russia, wherever. A complacency, a smugness, a racially tinged feeling that for all the problems in your land, it has many upsides while their land has few. A feeling that their problems would justify violence, revolution, uprising, but your problems should be solved by working within a system that has never done anything but appropriate the memories of its victims while continuing the victimization and has been happy to brutally crush any real dissent and threats to it time and again.

Minimization of real western atrocities in favor of playing up, laser-focusing on accusations against others.

Meh. I would have respected them more for at least trying to finish the trilogy of Prometheus and Covenant. Problematic as they were they were at least more interesting from a lore perspective than inserting other random Alien encounters magically retconned into existence between the existing films which is kind of a low effort, low risk, low pay-out thing to do. And one that I might add seriously risks adding retcons or changes to the magic and feeling of the original trilogy.

They’ll never come close to touching the quality of the first two films (3 if you count the Assembly cut which really made 3 a much better film) and if you just want jump-scares and gore and horror certainly continuing the Prometheus storyline could give you some of that.

Vile and dangerous cults.

I suppose they refer to the fact the DPRK uses crypto-coins to evade sanctions. It’s not that their whole economy is based on them and really it seems most likely a large amount of the coins they do own have been stolen from the west via hacks so their exposure to actual risk should the whole thing go down in flames is likely to be lower and less impactful than if you as an individual invested in it and the whole thing went down in flames.

Fact is they don’t do a ton of foreign trade so the actual amount of crypto-coins used compared to both total size of foreign trade with friendly countries like China and Russia as well as the total size of their economy which isn’t foreign-trade oriented is pretty small so again it’s not a big risk for them to use them for sanctions evasion whereas the exposure to an individual putting half their savings in crypto is a lot, lot worse.

I’m not particularly an economic expert so take my words with a grain of salt but I don’t see crypto as particularly useful as an investment vehicle, it’s basically a situation where you either got in on the ground floor and got rich off a fluke OR you’re using them to do illegal things like buy narcotics or send funds to sanctioned or designated groups (though with the latter in particular the US can track an trace a lot of the coins back to people eventually so I really wouldn’t risk it). Beyond that I don’t think they necessarily have a lot of value. Most of the big investors got in fairly early so if most of the larger coins were to say lose 30% of their value they wouldn’t be badly hurt whereas you if you bought now and placed your savings in them would be.

In The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a key figure in shaping US policy thinking last century and this no doubt, it’s mentioned that there is region, a triangle of critical control in the middle east that can prevent the uniting of Asia, Africa, and Europe. It is the cross-roads of all these three and although I’m not sure he mentions destabilization, he does mention control and one way to control a region or at least deny its usefulness to others is to destabilize it with terrorism and extremism. To that end the US wants to prevent China and Russia from having good healthy relationships and trade with Africa and Europe because that’s land-power that locks the US, far across the oceans, entirely out. That’s a potential that would destroy any hopes for US hegemony.

Racism is a part of it, they’re not the communist party of China, they’re the Chinese Communist (party), playing up the yellow peril and the red threat at once and then dropping off with the party part at the end which they couldn’t care less about. It centers and racializes it. We’re not just fighting commies, we’re fighting Chinese commies.

Oh wow do not reverse image search the source of this image. It looks like it’s from some anti-feminist book. Complete cringe.

It’s not a slur itself though.

It was used by a schizophrenic man who developed his own operating system (TempleOS) and suffered paranoid delusions (I assume, maybe the feds were really doing some MKUltra stuff to him for some reason but on balance I suspect he was imagining it).

What he fully called them was “Glowing n-words”, I’m pretty sure the less offensive “glowie” came about from others who heard about this and did find the idea of federal agents literally glowing kind of funny, glowing as in standing out.

So I wouldn’t say it’s offensive in this format. Because again it’s not like Terry was some leader of white supremacy or something, he was a mentally ill man who suffered greatly in life but also did something pretty impressive and the whole idea of feds standing out in a visual way is pretty funny you have to admit.

Unless you can pull people left there without drawing the ire of the leadership (doubtful) I think you’ve found yourself in a compromised group. That they’d make people like that leaders is telling of the white chauvinism and imperialist thinking of the group. They’re not left, they’re recuperative, liberal, and dangerous in spreading fascist lies.

Unless they’re doing some really good work (and even then) you might consider whether it wouldn’t be better for your mental health to ditch them and find a hobby group not so focused on politics to join instead if you need community.

Touting oneself as being for a better world is meaningless. The CIA and USA believes that. Who after all would attract people with the message of a worse world, of wanting to make things worse? Even fascist counter-revolutionaries who kill communists and commit atrocities would claim they are creating a better world. One needs to look for solid tenets: anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism. Sometimes one can find groups that aren’t of the left better than this, there are the rare anti-war liberals who are truly anti-war and that includes increasing tensions with China and swallowing propaganda about them and Russia.

I hope you find a better group of people you can spend time with OP. It may be serious organizing will have to wait until after university and that’s okay.