i feel like 8 years is pretty damn good lifespan for a laptop, good job

oh, how the time passes!

happy cake day to me, almost can’t believe it’s been four years

i’ve grown to think that while there is such a thing as normal, everyone has some aspect of abnormality to them. additionally, i think every difference from normality has some value in its distinction from normality, even if it’s only to better understand what is truly universal to the human experience.

obviously that’s not to say the difference cannot also be challenging or disabling in our present society. but that has helped me a lot coming to term with my differences, big and small, is finding whatever value i can in them.

hope you feel better soon, comrade.

really sorry you’re feeling that way, comrade. depression is tough. hope you feel better soon.

yeah that’s true he does, i guess she must have dual citizenship that i forgot about too, making her even less russian haha.

the only other russian representation in the show is a woman who is his longstanding “deep friends with benefits,” but she’s played off as being more worldly and therefore less russian: she speaks english fluently, she travels to see him in various US/canadian cities, etc etc. otherwise yes, all of the other russians in the show are definitely cartoonishly evil lol

i watched it and had pretty mixed feelings about it all around. as far as the russophobia is concerned though, i actually thought everything to do with ilya’s (the russian main character) family had much worse implications than anything else. the issues for queer people in russia are at least believable, but the ancillary stuff was not: ilya’s father was both an important figure in the government, and also suffering from dementia at the same time, for multiple years (i mean, really???). and ilya’s brother was a coked up exploitative asshole trying to milk ilya for everything that he was worth. that stuff really stuck out to me as russophobic, because what kind of government except a totally inept and fake one would keep on a prominent figure with dementia? this despite all the issues in the past with western gov leaders having dementia (biden, reagan, possibly even bush, etc).

empathy is my middle name. just remember that the human mind is always rational one way or another, or at/according to one time or another. if you didn’t work on your large workload today, i’m sure there was a rational reason for it, if i had to guess stress relief. you don’t need to blame yourself for acting rationally.

really do hope you feel better.

sorry to hear that, comrade. hope you’re doing ok

highly recommend babel!

self and class consciousness is tough man, especially if you’ve lived that way your whole life, you learned to live like that from a very young age, and furthermore if you have childhood or other trauma that incentivizes you to keep yourself from becoming conscious in order to avoid processing painful memories without a sufficient framework (or social support) to do so. unless you have a material interest, a material need to become conscious, most people don’t, and that’s okay. that doesn’t make them any less rational

on the other hand, jealousy and lack of contentedness seem like internal contradictions for you to work on personally, regardless of how you relate to or interpret others. in my opinion jealousy is a cognitive error taught to us by liberalism, and the correct response is actually something more like inspiration or wonder. in my own personal experience, my feelings of jealousy were derived from insecurity (material, leading to psychological) that i experienced as a young child, and resolving those feelings has made it much easier to not feel jealous of others.

if you feel that the way you interact with things (from what you said, primarily how you consume media) is the only possible way for you, but you don’t feel content about it, i would explore why it is that you feel that way. if you feel that the way you interact with things is truly inferior than the approach of others for any reason, and yet you still feel compelled to interact with things in the way that you do, i would investigate why. and if you’re uncertain which of those two statements is more correct, i would investigate that as well.

i think it’s not enough to just point out errors of liberalism in the fashion of mao and expect them to be magically corrected. if we fully accept the rationality of every human (on an individual and class level), then there are always specific material reasons why we learned to think incorrectly, as it were. in the same way that diamat gives us the tools to investigate the history of society in terms of its internal contradictions, dialectical materialism also gives us the tools to investigate - and resolve - our own internal contradictions, resulting in more correct and less liberal cognition.

sorry for the text dump hahaha. it’s just something i happen to have been thinking a lot about lately.

cannibalism? should i even ask?

i’m a big fan of all ferments, but kimchi takes a special place in both my heart and stomach

i’m jealous of your kimchi

i mean, we all have identities related to our experiences: with production, with consumption, and with interacting with other humans. i think there are two primary ways that liberalism mangles the concept of identity:

• liberalism encourages identities to be primarily based on consumption at the expense of production. think someone whose entire identity is disney, but their job is office work. the latter is not glamorized, and is in fact encouraged by liberalism to be seen as some sort of failure, in contrast to the apparent success of the bourgeoisie under capitalism. consumption is often used an escape from the bulk of people’s lives, they productive work. this is one way that class consciousness is discouraged

• in the instances where liberalism embraces identity, it does so at the expense of the material conditions that led to the identity in the first place. in fact, it sometimes proposes that identity is not only dominant over material conditions, but is self-reinforcing, pretending that there is not a fundamental relationship between the two. think how right-wing liberals claim that being trans is “just in your head,” but when left liberals are asked to define gender the word “patriarchy” will never even occur to them. this is another way that class consciousness is discouraged

in each dialectic, productive identities are primary over consumptive ones, and material conditions are primary over the identities that they foster. neglect of this fact results in deep, deep alienation.

生日快乐!

you really struck a chord with me with mention of that liberal mentality. liberalism encourages us to derive our identity as much from consumption rather than production, because identity based on production leads to class consciousness