I feel ya comrade. The isolation feels real.

I really never go back myself, but I keep it around because first things first, there are more specific hobbyists and knowledge subreddits that still contain useful information.

Sleep apnea, vertigo, things like that where people aren’t talking politics at all, and they just want to talk about their condition and ask questions and get some help.

I still sometimes find it useful for tech questions and answers and in general might use it to look up some recommendations or reviews. But in actuality it is becoming worse and worse and worse for things like that. So I’m not sure how long that will last.

You used an operative word there, “never”.

I don’t know your relationship with your dad, your socioeconomic status, your age, your ability to change people’s minds. Etc. But if you really think that the answer is “never”, then you have a decision to make. Whether your dad is worth maintaining a relationship with or not. Would you still spend time with your dad if you never talked politics again?

If you’re young, your dad might not have a kind of respect for your ideas compared to if you were older. That’s just how it is with parents, that will come with time. Maybe you can convince him of these ideas in 10 years, when you’re older, he’s older, and the world has gone even more to shit, And maybe he sees the systemic problems behind it.

If you’re wealthy, your dad probably has the same mentality that most people who are wealthy have, which is that they deserve everything that they have, and fuck everybody else. I don’t really know how to change those people’s minds.

If you guys are not well off, then you can try to leverage regular socioeconomic talking points. Getting him to understand that the system is rigged and that kind of stuff.

It’s important to spend our time in places that matter the most. Maybe your dad will never understand. Accept it and spend your time on other people you might know.

Yeah, they said all the cities looked ugly with parking lots so they just “pretend all parking is underground” and igore the costs/upkeep with something like that.

I always go back and forth on this part, because protesters with a handful of guns greatly outnumber the police with bigger guns. So, in theory, the protesters would win, but not without major losses. The police station example is a good one.

But I don’t know if it’s worth escalating until we’re actually ready to start a revolution. Any escalation will eventually be outdone by police, right? The only way we can possibly win is by sheer numbers and organizing. That would necessitate a massive amount of organizing. And until we’re ready for that, we’re just gonna get squished.

It reminds me of the BLM activity in the Pacific Northwest in 2020. I mean Seattle literally had multiple city blocks that police weren’t allowed to enter. But eventually it falls.

But I don’t know. I feel like my thoughts around this are wrong in some way. It also feels like the left has been tricked into peacefully protesting and we’re just having a hard time getting out of that.

In my local organizing, it’s pretty tough because it kind of feels like everybody is so damn hesitant to actually piss people off or be too inconvenient or something like that. Nobody wants to block a bridge or shut down a plant or anything like that because everyone is so afraid of the optics.

they are now trending back in the other direction.

There are certainly people who call themselves communist that miss this point too!

S4A sadens me, he does lots of great work turning communist texts into audiobooks, but then latches onto one aspect of china that blinds him to the truth. China used capitalism to beat the west at their own game, and now they get to change the rules.

All good comrade, it’s so hard to tell online haha. I figured it could have been (mostly) a joke.

I might peddle for donations once I work up the courage. Until then it’s on my mom’s credit card lol.

Absolutely no disrespect intended because anyone doing work like this is my comrade, but is this a joke?

I’d be cautious of trusting that things last a long time on here if the above quote is real.

Otherwise, if needed, I’m sure someone on here (unfortunettely not me atm, I don’t have the time, but in the future for sure, yes) could help with costs and maintenance.

You’re not taking into account that there is actual science behind these claims.

And for political science, it’s of course a lot less science and a lot more history and interpretation.

Of course, we teach kids simple things in order to allow them to step through science to the more advanced stuff. But the fact is when you want to debate medicine like this, you need real evidence. And a junk study that has never had a follow-up is not evidence-based medicine.

For example, the gender and sex thing is an overly simplistic way of explaining a more complicated process. But the actual science about that more complicated process exists. The advanced science about CO2 in the blood is junk. We can analyze this from an evidence-based medicine perspective. This is not real science.

For all of its faults, there is a reasonably high quality, evidenced-based way of doing real science and evidence-based medicine. And I’m sorry, this is pretty clear cut, but this is not real science.

I suppose it would be groundbreaking and well known if it was really as important and had the role Buteyko says, and that wouldn’t remain secret.

This is the strategy for junk science and fake medicine practitioners around the world. To claim that their work is actually on the cusp of discovering something new, even if the idea is 50, 100, or 1000 years old.

We can talk all day about how evidence-based medicine is impersonal and doctors just aren’t good with their patients and they’re pushing people away into the alternative medicine industry. But the fact of the matter is that evidence-based medicine is medicine and this is not.

testimonies are lies?

Remember you can be honest and still wrong. “Feelings” you get are not science based medicine. The placebo effect is very strong indeed.

some data backing it up.

I don’t have time to look into it right now, but a lot of times preliminary studies that are not decisive will sometimes be forwarded as evidence when it’s really not. Also, there are for-profit journals where you can publish junk science (I mean all journals are for profit. But at least some of them try to do good science. At any rate, there are definitely journals that do not give a shit about science and are just there to make money. This is, of course, a problem with capitalism, but we’re talking about science right now.)

Buteyko is more like how people breathed during most of our species’ existence

No it is not. Please be aware that the way your body naturally breathes is just fine unless you have a very well-known breathing condition.

I’m sorry, but this is junk science through and through.

Oh shoot, there’s a Cuba community. I should have thought about that. Thanks, comrade.

This is a fantastic resource comrade. Thank you. Off the top of your head, do you know of a place I can find more textbooks or classroom-like material from communist countries available in the US? Either in print or digital?

I think others have covered it well, but I hope you know that you don’t have to suffer for the cause. I have private health insurance, because fuck the system, but in the meantime I and my family don’t need to suffer.

We totally do. All people need a social life, but as an introvert I just like to space out my social time, or when in public I tend to not talk to people, but we certainly do get lonely.

Yeah, as I just responded to someone else, this is the weird intersection between science and philosophy. If I had perfect knowledge about the universe, but I can’t predict this quantum interaction, then do I have enough knowledge to predict your actions? How much room do I have before this interaction becomes “well, i can predict with statistical chance, and that is good enough”.

BTW, I wasn’t throwing up my hands with "we can’t predict quantum, so it’s all moot’. Like, yeah, I now there’s statistics around it, I know more than I let on in that comment, I wasn’t here to lecture about quantum mechanics, and as I stated, the ones that do state that this is not fully known science.

Like, literally we don’t know if we have free will. That’s why this is a philosophical argument. This is just one piece.

This is why it’s hard to talk about any scientific facts, even when surrounding a philosophical argument. Yes, maybe we could find a way eventually, but we need that evidence first, and as of right now, there’s evidence to show that we actually can’t have perfect knowledge.

But yeah, “anything could change” is like, always there, so, sure.

There’s one practical scientific argument against free will. And that is that: that:

1. Given the base of all decision-making, and even thoughts, in humans is on chemical reactions in the brain.

2. The chemical reactions we are referring to affect neurons firing. Neurons firing is actually how the brain works.

3. The action potential is what determines whether or not a neuron will fire. The action potential is based on a ton of teeny tiny interactions at the chemical level.

4. Those teeny tiny chemical reactions are quantum.

5. Quantum things are inherently unpredictable. No, I do not mean they are difficult to predict. I mean, even with perfect knowledge, they are literally unpredictable.

6. Even with perfect knowledge, you will not understand entirely if someone is going to have particular neurons firing, and they can have many downstream effects because there are billions of neurons, and sometimes entire thoughts are caused by only only thousands of them, and literally that would be unpredictable.

Okay, but here’s some caveats.

A. Just because something is unpredictable does that mean you have free will. In fact, in theory, if it’s completely unpredictable, even if you have perfect knowledge, then that actually means you don’t have free will and that your actions are just random. So I wouldn’t call that better.

B. Anybody who claims they understand quantum mechanics is lying. Even here I’m kind of just using it as a philosophical tool because I have no idea if you can actually predict anything in quantum mechanics. I just know that the quantum mechanics scientists basically say that you can’t.

Back in my liberal, scientific, neurological, philosophical days. This is basically the end of the conversation I made it to in terms of free will. I haven’t really thought about it much since then. Food for thought if you are interested in thinking about it further.

I think the other comments are worth reading. I just wanted to make an addendum that I’m not sure that this is anything more than a definition technicality.

Of course, Marxists use the term “state” to define an entity which oppresses some group of people as a communist. We want to oppress the bourgeoisie.

But let’s think for a moment about what a government is or what a state is. It is a group of people that either represents the people’s interests or doesn’t, but either way it is a group of people that create rules and laws and have an effect on other people in society.

So if we decided not to have a state or government or anything like that, but then revolutionists still understand that socialism is required as an intermediary step to communism. So they build a group, whatever they call it, which is in fact a group of people that creates laws and regulations and make sure that the capitalists don’t get out of control, etc.

What would you call that? Is that a state? Is that a government? Is that just a group of people? Either way, it seems to create the same function that a state or government might do. Therefore, this to me seems like a technicality of definitions.

Let me know if this isn’t how you’re thinking about it. Maybe it’s deeper than just a definition change, and maybe I miss-understood something.

I’m gonna be honest. I kind of probably was sort of somebody like that back in my liberal days.

I put in a lot of wiggle words because I don’t know exactly what you’re referring to, but it definitely is how I felt.

I’ve done a lot of college. I have science degrees, I have a computer science degree, and I have spent a lot of time in my free time, in my liberal days studying math and science and skepticism and woodworking and finance and repairs and all kinds of stuff.

Pre-Marxism, my favorite types of podcasts were literally just random podcasts talking about random science-y or factual things, and I absorbed it all, and honestly it probably prepped me to learn about Marxism too because I learned to be very focused and able to take in a lot of information very quickly. In essence, I practiced being able to learn a whole lot even when not under school pressure.

But…

I don’t think anybody would have called me a mean person or an asshole. In fact, even when I told people I felt that way, they were like, “Nah man, you’re fine.”

But I was talking to liberals, not Marxists. My perspective has changed a little bit ( Just joking, it’s changed an exceptional amount.), and in a lot of ways I actually do kind of consider myself a douchebag compared to what I know now.

No matter how much someone knows about a particular topic, it’s really easy to put blinders on about every other topic. I got pretty good at this over time trying to admit what I didn’t know, but I think that’s what helped open me up to Marxism versus all the people who aren’t willing to learn about it because of the scary communist terms.

I put on my alternative hat and I think, “Okay, from this person’s perspective, what do I think? What would they think? How would I feel if I was in that position?” A lot of people don’t do that. They learn science or facts or something very specific, but they aren’t very good at emotionally connecting to other people.

It’s why emotional intelligence is considered something completely separate from typical intelligence. And of course you can’t really measure either of those things very accurately. They’re just words that we use to describe them. But you can tell when somebody has low emotional intelligence.

I definitely held emotionally charged beliefs about China and Russia and pretty much anybody that the Western newspapers told me to hate. It wasn’t very easy to see things from other people’s perspectives. It took a lot of time to open up and that requires dedication. And if somebody’s really interested in math or science but not interested in people, they aren’t going to put in the time.

Liberal democracies really like it when people learn science and mechanics and engineering and finance because that is stuff that the professional managerial class does, and that helps the bourgeoisie make money. But learning about Marxism and communism and the idea that there is oppressive systems and not just individual faults of individual people, well that threatens the existence of the establishment. These indirect, or even direct, threats of the establishment get translated into a culture among liberal democracies that biases against these ideas, even among the intellectuals.

I’m of two minds about this. Let me explain.

On the one hand…

People are scared of “Marx”, “communism”, and sometimes even “socialism” (Though some people think it means “just some parts of europe with more social programs than us”, and those people are wrong, but at least have positive associations with the word). Terms like ‘tankie’ get thrown around loosely, and the USSR, China, DPRK, Cuba, are all “bad places” that westerners don’t want to be associated with. In this way, re-naming things can help introduce the concept in a fresh way, because most people actually want to bring about the change that communists/socialists do, but they are conditioned to ignore everything positive about it’s history. So far, my biggest problem with explaining communism to people is using communist terms, this throws them into a bad place and think my arguments are wrong from the get-go. But if I introduce something in a terms-neutral way, explaining in great detail instead of using descriptive communist terms, most people are on the same page (With some exception because liberals still believe in ‘personal freedom’, and it can be difficult to get them to track all the way from a ‘peoples congress’ to a party that only acts in the way the ->people<- want. Most people of western countries think that it’s basically impossible to build it, but would like it if it’s possible… Ugh these people need to learn about China…)

On the other hand…

If we continue to use terms like “Means of production”, “liberal”, “fascist”, “dialectics”, “materialism”, “reactionary”, “neocolonial”, etc. then people can look these terms up, read old books, and see that the arguments of communists/socialists of the past 200 years have been talking about this. It’s a powerful message to send, that this is not new, this information has been suppressed, that the red scare did actually control information and was just as authoritarian as any socialist country they’ve heard of, and these things are relevant and important to know. Connecting communism to historical events and ideas is important.

On the third hand…

This, of course, takes a lot of time. I’m a new commie and it took me a few months of just reading, listening, and studying before I even really uttered the word “communist” to anyone I knew. I just didn’t feel comfortable until I could understand enough to speak intelligently about it. Most people are not patient enough to do that, they want to scroll tik tok, facebook, twitter (or x), or reddit, or whatever they do daily, and not think about these complicated things. Most people get their “info” from these garbage sources, and it takes real effort, that a lot of people don’t have the energy to give, to understand these things.

As a final argument…

I don’t know if I want to sell a bunch of libs on the idea of robots building/running everything. See, like in the movie “Elysium” (Yes it’s a lib film, not communist, but it does give insight into the struggles of the global south from a lib perspective, and was actually inspired by the writer getting arrested in Mexico and seeing ‘the other side of the fence’ himself, and forcing some self-reflection about living in a rich place bordering poverty) a lot of those libs will see the shiny technocratic future of making their lives insanely, extremely better, but won’t extend that privilege to the global south. If we, as communists, sell them on this future, but then when we are in charge, do something like open our borders, or actually treat Mexico like human beings, or even build that technocratic future of robots building things, but we spread the wealth, and instead of making our lives 1000x better, we making the entire world 100x better, but maybe only make our lives 1.5x better, then those libs might see our work as a ‘failure’, or as a ‘compromise’.

Anyway TLDR: libs believing in a technocratic future prefer to see see themselves ->living<- on Elysium, having that personal medical machine keeping them young and pretty and acne free forever, instead of letting those medical machines heal disease worldwide, saving a billion lives.