Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I live in public housing in the deep south; in a building as old as I am (60+). It’s falling apart and should be condemned. Sporadic hot water- and when there IS hot water it’s 140 degrees and the cold water CUTS OUT all the time when the hot water is working- showers can scald you if you are not able to move fast enough.
The housing authority told us they were building new buildings and for us to hold on until then (6 years?) but they refuse to fix the boiler in the meantime. 6 years is a long time to think about not having hot water when you need it. And the only way to tell if there’s hot water is to test it, sometimes the only time you can shower with hot water is at 2 am or whatever. shrug
So people are rightfully upset, we are all senior / disabled/ living way below the poverty level. People tried to stand up to the administration of the Housing Authority and got tossed out of the meetings by a fucking police whom they had there just because they know no hot water upsets people.
The main dude of the HA is this tall bougie ass black dude who resembles one of the uppity gangsters on the Chi - fucker got mad when I left the meeting after seeing the cop loom over one of my neighbors when they asked too many questions out of turn. I got up and left and they told me later that that big GQ looking bougie dude (who wears sunglasses to meetings so, SO DO I) asked “Who is that , who just left this meeting?”
Later after the meeting broke up I was coming back from my walk (to clear my head from the rage at having a cop attend a meeting with old/disabled folks in it) and bougie dude was walking out to his car. I walked right past him with a giant snarl and dared him to say anything to me. He did not. He stared straight forward and kept walking.
I saw him again last week outside the admin building next door and I coughed loudly and spit on the ground next to his car. Fucker did not turn around but he could see me in the reflection. Bougie ass removed with a PHd in how to fuck over poor people. Threatening us with eviction (they actually have no where to put us all) if we get rowdy about the hot water.
Threatening us. Looming over us and having cops at meetings. Fucking fascists. No hot water, shitty guards at the door, (hell I walked in on one in the bathroom, he didn’t even bother to lock the bathroom door. He was on cloud 9 high as a kite looking at his phone with his pants down around his ankles and I laughed and said “I was just looking all the fuck over for you. I was thinking of calling your supe!” and he says “HUH?”
Our front door card reader doesn’t work, the parking lot gate doesn’t work, people break into the building by jumping the side gates, people let criminals in here all the time, it’s nuts. It’s basically 3rd world right around the corner from bougie ass downtown. There’s always a cop in the elevator going up to arrest someone, always paramedics taking OD’d folks out of here, and we can’t even have hot water.
So glad I served this shithole country in the Nat Guard
so glad I worked my ass off for decades under the table not knowing that I’d not get much Social Security if I didn’t get on the payroll, no one told me Until I was like 35. I’m autistic as fuck too. ADHD, CPTSD, PTSD-- yet I know what is right from wrong and this is bullshit. That all said I spend my days helping the less fortunate at the homeless camp bringing them food and clothing and materials I gather from the 'hood. The 'hood provides when the government does not.
Thanks for listening to my stupid rant -Zed
I have everything you have living in Virginia, but with better living conditions (though I did live in poverty when I was younger). C-PTSD? Check. ADHD? Check. Autism (maybe you have it too, idk)? Check. Oh, and POTS and Erlers-Dandrom syndrome. Oh yeah, and IBS lol for extra measure. I’m out of a job for five months now and am afraid to go back, but have been searching up until now, where I have stopped for the time being. I live in a mostly BIPOC or Latinx neighborhood, btw. It’s a doozy, but hey, I’m trying to get through it. It’s impressive that you go through what you do every day.
Also, are you in Louisiana or Mississippi?
Women’s football (s*ccer): we need to help refugees and support LGBTQ+ people and raise awareness of mental health
Men’s football: I’m a nazi now
Men! Not even once.
Hijacked a party of Flemish nationalist at the city’s main square with Palestinian flags after the right wing city government banned some pro Palestinian artists from attending
Can’stop the people singing you shits fuck you
(Not me btw)
just entered my uni class thing
les celebrate, wooooooo!!!
*Let’s. (Sorry, congratulations!)
i did that as a joke based on that one 4 year old meme i know how to write
A socdem politician came to visit my workplace today. Now, we are severely understaffed and overworked. Today was no exception. Place was packing with clients who had to wait 3 hours to get help. Insane day.
She came in with an entourage accompanied by our directors. It was like the queen herself came to the place. Pictures were taken of her standing at our workplace, looking interested.
She didn’t say a single fucking word to us or our clients. Not one. Not even hello. Absolute 0 sign of respect. Fucking shithead. It was as if she came to see some monkies at the zoo.
I know that feeling. Living in 3rd world - ish public housing and the directors do not look at you, don’t care to know your name, would rather die than go in your apartment. They wear the stupidest most garish clothing to a place where most of us get our clothes from the dumpster/goodwill/sidewalks. They drive BMWs and Mercedes up in here-- who the fuck is making that kind of money managing public housing? One starts to want to put sugar in gas tanks (in Minecraft of course)
My boss is also a socdem. Says all the right things until you try and unionize/organize. One of the fakest people I’ve ever met
Fuck that’s my current situation as I’m organizing my workplace.
To be fair, we have a “union” but our union president is compromised completely
This is why we call them social fascists
Just a photo op, eh?
And just talking to the managers, I see…
https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/21349_Tuxedo_Cat
I saw this in a magazine and got it as a holiday present for my uncle yesteryear. This thing has been a pain in the ass since I got it. I remember the evening when it was lethally cold outside and we slowly walked into the shopping mall (which was playing abysmal music) to pick up a copy. I was annoyed being in the LEGO shop and bringing it home, but whatever. That was just ill luck.
I started assembling it a day or two later. It was very boring: the process of assembling it takes several hours, and at one point I had to stop working on it for a day because I was so bored (and sweaty) putting it together. Seriously, has anybody ever noticed how boring it is to assemble a LEGO set that has over a thousand pieces? I don’t mind a few hundred pieces, but a thousand or more is obscenely excessive.
Anyway, after I finished assembling it and giving it to my mom so that she could gift it, I thought that that would be the end of it. Nope. Some prick released a third-party add-on that hooks lights up to the set and my mom insisted on buying that. We returned to my uncle’s house and I thought that applying the add-on would be easy enough, but the vague instruction book (written in broken English) and my uncle’s real cat whining repeatedly caused me to leave his house in anger.
It was in-between this and the time when I finally installed the add-on that I learned that one of my uncle’s students knocked over the set before trying to reassemble it, making the add-on’s instructions even harder to follow, and somehow my mom or my uncle lost a few LEGO pieces in his car. That thing is almost as fragile as glass.
So after procrastinating for several days, I finally installed the fucking lights on the imperfectly reassembled and incomplete set and my mom takes it back to my uncle’s house. (She insisted that the add-on installation be secret because she wanted to ‘surprise’ him, but he undoubtedly wondered why it suddenly went missing, so my mom must have spoiled the surprise.)
Fast-forward a few months and I get a text from my mom asking where the instruction manual is because they somehow lost it (WHAT‽); the set needs to be reassembled again and this time she is going to use glue even though the LEGO Group discourages that, and I’m not doing it myself because she knows that I’m fucking sick and tired of handling that overpriced heap of plastic.
I am so sorry that I ever got that set and I wish that I never got into LEGO. I hate LEGO now. Overpriced boxes of shit.
Come to think of it, I hate toys in general now, basically. Tom Hodgkinson can explain it for me.
I’m kind of happy that I scooped out the whole toys and vidya part of my brain and replaced it with history and computers
I’m sorry for your misery but this kinda made me laugh.
when i was in middle school, i made a mario pixel art lego thing and it was shown in the entrance there. a day later it was mangled to hell and back
:(
My native fruit vines i planted last year just came up again. I was getting worried they were a bit behind schedule. Looking forward to having some in a few months. :)
Lets gooo
What fruit
Maypop passion fruit
That’s cool. Some person in the street of my office has a passiflora growing on the side of their house and the flowers are really cool. Absolutely not native though lol.
Is it Passiflora Edulis, or Passiflora Incarnata? Incarnata is the non-tropical one and native to the southeast US among other places while edulis is native to the tropics.
I believe it is a passiflora caerulea, native to South America
DPRK art 🇰🇵🎨
“Creators of great feats” by Hong Jin Kyung.
prob my most asshole move but i constantly remind people in agriculture that call themselves “engineers” that they’re not engineers but glorified salesmen. like dude you have never ever used a tool in your life, all you do is drive around selling pesticides or whatever that you didn’t even develop or anything.
Hey, don’t hate them so much. 🫠
Los ingenieros agronomos do work depending on the project. Actually, I could have been one in another life.
Here is a rice field in Cuba!
I have no doubt that there are some actual agronomists out there but in my region every freaking vendor calls himself engineer but all they do is resell products.
You need to up your asshole game if that’s the best you’ve got. You should be telling liberals that they are rolling out the red carpet for the next hitler, yelling at old ladies in the hair salon for their complicity in climate change.
People being divorced from production and paying outrageous amounts of money for funkopops does not disprove the theory of value.
Marx was so real when he said that
Just got back from a trip to Japan and South Korea. Was originally supposed to go to China but there were issues that stopped that from being feasible.
Japan was surprisingly awesome. Such friendly people and so respectful. SK is definitely worst Korea though. It’s basically the US in another language.
I once knew a Neo-Nazi who was an amateur MMA fighter. Just looked up his record the other day: 0 wins 6 losses, 2 by Unanimous decision, 2 by submission (got choked out), 2 by KO, 4/6 ended in the first round. 😂 😂 😂 😂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0DKieA4sk
Ooo i had been thinking about getting into MMA does this mean if i do I’ll get to beat up Nazi’s legally?
From what I have heard its almost impossible to find an mma gym with no nazis and the second the nazis know you are a leftist they will hound you.
I heard of that as well. Thought it was an exaggeration until I found an open Nazi in one gym that I go to(I have multi branch gym subscription).
I was thinking of looking for a gym with a good queer community figure if they advertise as queer friendly it probably turns off Nazis from signing up.
I wouldn’t really be doing MMA to socialize anyway. I’d just learn what i need to learn, and cancel the membership after.
Not just Nazis but Zionists too
Now i need to buy a shirt with stalins face on it so i can wear it when i start going lol
Unless you are already a well trained fighter this is not a good idea. It could easily turn into serious bodily harm under the guise of “we were just sparing.”
yeah i was just being cheeky even libs would probably freak out about that. I wouldn’t wear something like that somewhere i didn’t know people already and know atleast some would be fine with it.
Bold of you to assume a lib knows what Stalin looks like 😆
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Being a vegan activist might unironically be harder than being a communist one. You’d have the most rational people losing all critical thinking ability the second you say vegan.
Yeah but your comrades are at least leftist. In many so called “vegan activism” orgs there are a lot of libs and people who say “no politics here”.
My litmus test to organize around it is to check whether they use the term vegan or antispeciesism to describe their activism. The latter usually implies at least leftist people in the org.
The struggle is real. Although in my experience I would say that doing vegan activism generally is “activism on easy mode” compared to communist agitation.
If you start the conversations off the right way and with context that gets people to think about animals, whether it’s a video, VR experience, information about the animal agriculture industry, etc. it’s a very straightforward A --> B for a lot of people. If you think animal abuse is bad --> don’t support animal abuse.
Of course there is the background of misconceptions about everything from health and nutrition, sustainability concerns (somehow), believing it’s more expensive to be vegan, thinking there must be a “right” way to murder an animal, etc. But in my outreach conversations I make a conscious effort to not argue with people.
The main goal is to get them to express their empathy for animals and confront the contradictions in their actions and values. Once they understand this, understand what veganism actually is and that it’s not a diet, it becomes much easier for them to address the information part as they’re already motivated by the “why”. From that point I don’t spoonfeed them information or argue with them, I just give them resources that they can look into on their own time.
Maybe for me it’s also a difference in experience because I haven’t had that many conversations regarding communism with many people. I feel that it’s impossibly hard. For veganism, all I needed to realise was this one contradiction regarding animal exploitation and abuse, and just inform myself mostly about diet stuff. For communism, it’s a process that took years, a lot of reading, a lot of correcting misconceptions about communism itself, a lot of history, a very large change in worldview, even though I would’ve described myself as an “anti-capitalist” for a long time before that.
