askchapo

Seiously, any place that it's easy to get a work visa for; doing anything. I just want out of this violent, racist rotting corpse of a country.

Remember those guys? Who were they? Where are they now? And my real question, were they an op?

I'm listening to RevLeft's episode on proletarian feminism and wondering about this. I think we can agree that in a global socialist society, the sex trade disappears. Under socialism, people only have sex because they want to. At the same time, almost all pornography produced under capitalism is itself produced under coercion. (A small number of porn stars are relatively wealthy and produce pornography because they enjoy it, not because they have to.) If a socialist society decides to make access to that pornography free for all, doesn't that mean that the porn stars (and all other workers involved in the production of pornography) are still being exploited, even if they're dead? In a socialist society, does all desire to jerk off to pornography wither away, since a sexual revolution has presumably also taken place and most people are relatively satisfied with regard to their sexual needs? Will some pornography still exist, produced by the proletariat for the consumption of the proletariat? Will future socialist porn stars be considered heroes of labor? I don't think we ever catch anyone in Star Trek jerking off to porn.

Map of countries with bans: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Burka_ban_world_map.svg/1024px-Burka_ban_world_map.svg.png

Context: a friend got a nuevo job in un leadership role. Trágicamente, she was fired after a people's uprising and had to flee.

She asked for tips and I told her to hide under boxes because it is the last place I always look when I lose my keys.

La policía must never lose anything because this was first place they checked. Now she is in jail for crimes against humanity.

How do I make things right? My wife says I have failed again and I must prove her wrong to save my marriage.

Is it just pure racism? Is it just overall hatred of poor people? Some combo of the two? Something else entirely?

Hello, chapos.

I'm posting from Dubai, and I hate everything this country stands for. I was born and raised here to immigrant Indian parents, and my dad owns a business, with a small number of migrant labourers under him. He pays them "more than what they'd get somewhere else" and that basically amounts to "send some money back home and live on the cheapest most affordable food" wages.

My mother is a manager at a company, and I recently saw her reprimanding a group of workers who came to raise a silent protest about their wages being halved. I stood there silently and cringed helplessly.

In this hypercapitalist cyberpunk (it is indeed low life, high technology sans the lawlessness) dystopian hellworld, racism, sexism, homophobia and classism is a way of life; and if it isn't overt, it is most definitely covert. I have been suffering from depression, suicidal ideation and mood disorders for the better part of a decade now.

After getting exposed to Marxist theories, the idea that I have been brought up on the fruit of surplus value stolen from labour weighs down on my mind. I also consider myself an ecosocialist, and that in itself is enough for me to hate the hellhole that I stay in. On the few occasions where I have tried to talk about my leftist ideals to either friends or family, I have been mocked, belittled and disregarded as a crazy fucking loser (been NEETing for 3 years now, I haven't been able to find a job with my college degree, and my mental illness makes it hard for me to persist/commit to anything) who is simply bitter and lazy, and is anyways just living off his parents, and is not to be taken seriously. Or they accept that I'm probably right, right before they sarcastically wish me good luck with a revolution.

I'm sick of living like this. I don't fit in anywhere, and when I do, I feel like I'm faking it. And oh yeah, to top it all off, I'm a closeted queer and an ex-Muslim atheist. I feel like I have very little to look forward in life. Doom-scrolling through r/collapse, seeing how the world is being overtaken by neoliberalism, the hate for minorities back in India led by the current fascist government, climate change denial ensuring a shittier quality of life down the decades in the region I live right now, lack of real social connections with irl folks...

I have been seriously considering suicide for the last week, and it feels like more than ideation. I think I've reached that stage of being at peace with suicide, and I think this post is some half assed attempt to reach out for help. I weirdly relate to a lot of the things you dudes say, so I thought I'd post here.

The system is failing even for those well positioned to ride the success of (but not hold stake in) the general market. The first upper-middle class runners are coming across the line to find nothing there. How does that effect the tipping point? Is this a marker of a Late Stage?

Does anyone even subscribe to the American Dream anymore? Maybe there isn’t a big pack running behind these first place white men to find a cliff at the finish line.

Is it the last remnants of an experiment burning out, or is it just the first car to crest the rollercoaster?

Or is the suicide stat meaningless and the power structure still favors inherited white male privilege so significantly that it’s dumb to grasp at minor perceived cracks forming? If this then what’s the stat about?

I work in medicine, and one of the hospitals in our system is the VA. I have literally no interest in serving veterans; people who fight in wars for America pretty much stand and act against everything I believe in. It's not necessarily that I think these people don't deserve great healthcare, it's that I don't want to be the one giving it to them. I would much rather spend my time serving people from my community who didn't spend large parts of their lives wrecking other communities.

Sure, some of my patients anywhere are going to be complete assholes. Sure, there are a lot of veterans who weren't involved in combat (but they did directly aid those in combat at least, right?). Idk, is there a perspective I'm not seeing here? Is it wrong for me to be morally opposed to working for the VA?

Curious where the majority of this site falls. No need to struggle or anything, I just wana see what y'all think.

North Korea—saw it from the DMZ. Saw the world’s largest or second largest flag billowing in the distance, the Potemkin village, as well as an underground tunnel leading into darkness. Our guide made the same annoying joke fifty times: “please don’t defect!” People have to be paid to live on the farms on the South Korean side because it’s so dangerous there, so they are also pretty much Potemkin villages. The “residents” only hang around for a few months out of the year. I was there in the winter, when it was extremely windy and cold. My impression was of a pretty bleak place. The mountains seemed to have all their trees cut down. But South Korea in the winter is also remarkably bleak. Factories, apartments, highways, smog. Having an American soldier show us the world’s most dangerous golf course should have been radicalizing but wasn’t.

Laos—spent a week or two there on two different occasions about ten years ago. My impression was that the country was much poorer than Thailand and that the people made almost no effort to ingratiate themselves with me, whereas Thailand probably has the friendliest people I have ever encountered (aside from some Kurds I met on the Turkish side of Kurdistan). I was a lib at the time but when I saw all the red flags everywhere I was just like, huh, cool. I only remember seeing them at the border with Thailand, and they were small, however. A lot of construction was going on in the new capital, Vientiane, whereas the old colonial capital, Luang Prabang, was in the middle of the jungle on the Mekong River and had a lot of charm. Fellow tourists told me that Chinese companies were cutting down all the trees. If only they were AMERICAN companies! I got into a crazy weird fight at a travel agency in Luang Prabang. It was the only time I’ve ever found myself in a shouting match with a total stranger. But things worked out in the end.

China—only been to the airports. They’re extremely large, new, and efficient and put American airports to shame. I don’t know if this is the policy now, but if you have to transfer, there comes a point where you can just walk out of the airport and hang out in China, even if you don’t have a visa. While I was moving from one terminal to the other I just found myself in front of the doors leading out to the taxis and I was like, whoa. A lib colleague teaches English in China now and told me that life went back to normal there months ago and that the people worship the government like robots. I wonder why!

Kerala—haven’t been, but feel like I want to live there. Ditto with Cuba and Vietnam. I was briefly in the Republic of Georgia as well as Cambodia, but both are obviously no longer leftist (or leftist-seeming in Cambodia’s case) states. It seemed like every other person was missing at least one limb in Cambodia and there were a lot of young kids there. Tbilisi had a cool subway system and some nice architecture but overall seemed pretty dead but I was there for barely more than one day.

folks were working together tryna build a way to heaven and god gets all pissed off that people won't need him anymore and destroys the whole thing and makes sure people can't organize against him by making everybody speak different languages.

I've visited the r/ultraleft sub and they are all really angry about it. Is this some kind of meme?

Does anyone else hate pretty much everyone else in your job field? I'm back in school now but in the year I was working at a full time job, basically every other engineer was a chud who absolutely refused to consider other people and were only doing engineering because they got paid a lot. I know it's good to get to know everyone you work with and build solidarity but it's basically impossible when they're all so insufferable.

How do all of you deal with it?

In the developed world (esp. the US), the hammer and sickle, symbols of labor, are not actually used that widely anymore. Industrial monocrop mechanised agriculture and assembly-line manufacturing processes, as well as the use of robotics means most workers are no longer swinging a hammer or sickle as they produce goods, such as food, for the society. tl;dr: As manual labor has changed in the US & developed countries, does this well-recognized Communist symbol need updating?

Magic the gathering, Warhammer, Video Games, even fantasy and scifi fiction, they all have had big I fights with right wingers in the last decade. The only exception I can think of maybe (MAYBE) would be DnD. Thoughts?

I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.

As I kid I remember it meaning you smoked a lot of crack, but I'm pretty sure now it means the same thing as "cool as hell"? Am I using it right?

I figured out "yeet" recently by playing Among Us with my kids, so that's cool. But I also don't know what "vibe check" means. I've had people explain it to me in detail and I still don't get it. That one might be unknowable.

If I want to have plans to actually leave the United States in the next four years, where should I be looking? I have hereditary Lithuanian citizenship so I might be able to get myself in the Schengen Area with that alone but I'm lucky enough to have expertise in an unspecified industrial technology, with the caveat that I am transgender.

Right now my two choices seem to be European (Germany?) or somewhere in E Asia (Vietnam, PRC). How realistic are either of these options, namely Vietnam or the PRC.