Eastern European ethnonationalists have been white ISIS for more than a century. The genocidal Ukrainian state of today continues the genocidal tradition of the OUN, and a quick look at what the rest of the region was up to at the time makes it obvious this is not a mere Ukrainian specific brainworm. The various Baltic collaborators, Romanian fascism, the Ustase, etc. All involved in horrific crimes against humanity. All still regarded as heroes by present day nationalists. The rot is everywhere and it runs extremely deep.

Animal Farm and 1984 are the next circle of Read Another Book Hell after the TERF wizard series.

Western “leftist” influencers can’t even reach the abyssally low bar of being the moderate wing of white supremacy.

No living being on this planet is weak or stupid for having a dysergulated nervous system as a result of trauma. Any serious materialist reading your post should understand how trauma responses form and get triggered instead of falling back on protestant brainworms where everything bad is a personal moral failure.

Ableism is a huge issue in society at large and leftist spaces are hardly any better than the average. People should make an effort to accomodate and at least meet you in the middle instead of putting all the pressure on you to pull yourself up by your mental bootstraps and ensure your trauma isn’t too visible and annoying. Especially when the accomodation in question is as simple as being more careful with the choice of words in a written format where you can pause and review before posting.

Don’t hesitate to stand up for yourself and make demands. If you don’t feel comfortable pointing out the specific terminology you have an issue with publicly, you can message me and I will do my best to keep it in mind and avoid it. And if I am among the people who make you uncomfortable, feel free to call me out.

This is the way. Small drops of leftist thought without any of the scary words when and only when the opportunity presents itself. Do not push the issue too hard, disengage rather than turning it into a pointless debate. The measure of success is people asking questions in good faith.

Political science in the US and it’s various vassal states is a very serious academic discipline. I personally witnessed a polsci doctoral student synthesize Anarcho-Zionism-Andriy-Biletsky-Thought within the span of like two paragraphs.

Take care of your body. Eat as best you can

Forgot to add eating to my take care of your body post but this is very important. Learn some basic cooking skills. The skill ceiling for cooking is in orbit but the floor for just keeping yourself fed better and cheaper than takeout slop is low. A few easy recipes go a long way, there’s a lot of stuff you can make in a single pan in 20-30 minutes.

My first adult health issue was caused by food. Drinking a mug of shitty instant coffee on an empty stomach for breakfast then greasy fast food slop for lunch. My stomach went on strike after a few months.

Average socialist leader: pulls country out of feudalism, greatly increases life expectancy, makes higher education accessible, rallies people to the defense of the nation and beats back genocidal invasions

The people: we greatly appreciate your efforts comrade, you are a hero and a role model to future generations

People on the internet (usually westerners, sometimes descendants of genocidal invaders): 😱 😡 is this a cult???

It’s so unserious. I think it’s a case of people who spent their entire lives under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie being unable to conceptualize having leaders that genuinely fight for the interests of the working class and therefore secure the loyalty of the people through their deeds. And coincidentally, being very concerned about people in AES countries liking their leaders too much and explaining it away as nefarious cults is something that benefits the imperialist plunderers of the planet.

First off, don’t sweat it too much and be kind to yourself. Chances are that you will do a lot of stupid things that you will cringe at in 10 years. We were all clueless young adults who made all sort of stupid mistakes, it’s a normal part of the human experience and it doesn’t make you any lesser. Accept, learn and grow.

Secondly, realize you are not immortal. Your body has limits that will become more and more apparent as time passes. Be kind to it and don’t make your organs’ job much harder than it has to be, it will only come to bite you in the ass once you’re past your mid 20s and your fast regen gets disabled. I touch computers and I wish I took better care of my back, now I do physical therapy to fix the effects of my neglect

Related to that, dude weed/booze/hard drugs lmao isn’t a personality. I knew a lot of these types in my early 20s and you’ll probably run into them too. Every one of those things are perfectly fine in moderation but the negative consequences of abuse are absolutely real and you aren’t going to dodge them for too long. Be the boring party pooper who knows their limits and takes care of their body and you will thank yourself for it eventually. Practice harm reduction, educate yourself on anything you think about consuming, know the interactions, remember you can always take more but never less and just stay away from anything mind altering that’s not prescribed by a psychiatrist when you are in a rough spot with your mental health.

I think you mentioned before that you are neurodivergent. Find your people. Even a single person who understands how your brain is wired makes a huge difference. I have ADHD and it helps a lot to have one safe person I can vent to about ADHD things who won’t hit me with Have you tried WILLPOWER or say uninformed bullshit about the medication that greatly improved my life because DrUgS. People tend to carry a lot of unexamined ableism and it can get very exhausting when you have an invisble mental condition.

This was mentioned before but it’s extra important for anyone neurodivergent: learn to not give a shit about what people think and about socially enforced measures of success. It’s a skill you have to hone through practice but once you manage to stop the impulse to sacrifice your own mental health to please every asshole it’s extremely liberating.

🫡

I’m Eastern European myself and even as a clueless liberal I remember looking at myself and other people in my social circle - all of us growing up in the later 90s and 00s - and thinking huh isn’t it a weird coincidence how basically all of us have all sorts of childhood trauma. Broken families, alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty, sexual abuse, so much misery flowing from the destruction of the socialist East.

Some extra material (warning: depressing):

https://youtu.be/xEBz9NPioe4

https://youtu.be/9NXUCiIgeMk

And my view is that communists need to have coherent messaging for people who become disillusioned with the system and start trying to understand why things are the way they are. That’s a far bigger demographic than all the left combined.

And that demographic of disillusioned people for whom the liberal narrative is collapsing and are looking for answers is growing. I know people who were generic liberals in 2022 and this year they started telling me that wtf they lowkey not hate Russia and Iran now. I can casually discuss topics that would have probably gotten myself labeled as a conspiracy-brained weirdo in the same category with flat earthers a few years ago. We can see in real time how previously entrenched worldviews are faltering under the pressure of a changing material reality and leaving behind fertile ground for radicalization. It’s providing great motivation for me to get off my ass and read more so I can sharpen my messaging.

For Russia and Eastern Europe in general, check these out:

• The Neoliberal Holocaust (pg 23)
• Deindustrialization and the Post-Socialist Mortality Crisis

I’m way too sleep deprived and off my ADHD meds today to write anything coherent, but I just wanted to mention that your posts in this thread are essentially identical to my own analysis and I relate a lot to some of the points you make here. Been thinking a lot recently that anarchists really insist on proving themselves among the child murdering billionaires’ strongest soldiers.

🫂

Insomnia is the worst. I’m also in the 3-4 hours of sleep per night zone at the moment, and gotta power through a bit more until I can see my psychiatrist next week. Hope things work out for you soon and you manage to break out of the loop, sleep deprivation makes everything so much more miserable.

The bright side is that once you manage to get some quality rest, the mental health effects are immediately obvious. I try to remind myself of this when I catch myself ruminating - my brain is scrambled from exhaustion and it will get better.

Dialectical Dispatches has a very good piece on diamat that explains it in detail. There’s also this older one by Dash the Internet Marxist that does a great job breaking the complex philosophy down into bits that are easy to digest, I read it several times back when I first started going down the rabbit hole and it stuck with me.

Even before studying Marxism I had this vague idea that woah dude things are complex systems and they are like in motion and stuff. This helped it all click together for me.

Don’t argue with people Lenin would have shot and don’t support people Lenin would have made fun of.

0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

Start with learning how to properly translate 3D forms into a 2D plane. It’s the most important fundamental of drawing. Drawabox was already mentioned and it’s a solid resource. If you are experienced at sailing the high seas and finding stuff, the better option is Dynamic Sketching by Peter Han. Drawabox draws inspiration from it.

There’s also an ongoing perspective course by Marshall Vandruff on proko.com if you can afford the price. I’ve looked at the free samples from it and it seems great and you will absolutely perspective for a visual novel. It’s new so I don’t know if you can find it from alternate sources, but if you can’t and don’t have the money, Dynamic Sketching or drawabox will still give you a great base.

Next up, human anatomy. Analytical Figure Drawing by Michael Hampton is a great resource. It shows you the form and placement of the major muscles you need to know as an artist one area of the body at a time. Another great teacher for anatomy is Steve Huston, try them both and see what sticks. I also like the Morpho anatomy books.

Feel free to message me if you need help tracking these down.

You received a lot of great information in this thread that is valuable for your own education as a marxist regardless. However, you should ask yourself what you are actually trying to achieve debating a staunch liberal who has already shown little good faith and a tendency to just handwave away facts that do not prove his worldview.

If it was about a public internet discussion, there is some merit to the argument that the point is convincing bystanders who are on the fence. But you mention it’s about conversations with a friend inside a small social group. Are you trying to turn your friends communist? Think about your own radicalization - were you a diehard liberal who got outdebated by a marxist with impeccable sources once and promptly decided they had to change their whole worldview?

People generally believe what they want to believe. Unless your friend is some sort of philosophy enthusiast who believes in truth and pursues it for the love of the game, this most probably applies to him too. I look for some sort of common ideological ground or an expressed frustration with the current system that communism has an answer to in order to gauge if an individual is worth debating and if I can’t find anything of the sort I just smile and dissociate and move on with my life. You have limited time and energy and picking battles you can win is an important skill to develop.

If you simply want to win the debate then just stop wasting your own time. Marxism is correct, and you know this to be true because otherwise you wouldn’t be posting on an obscure communist website. You don’t need other people to validate your worldview. Let them learn through struggle and focus on your own education so that you can better engage with them when they are willing.