1. I do whenever I can, in my work I can’t, because it’s socially so frowned upon here. I try to work alone/remote as much as I can becaude of this and bought and aur purifier for my office, I have high risk loved ones, have longcovid and so does people closest to me. I’d rather mask everywhere, did not miss the smells of other peoples sweat at all.

2. In my country (Finland) masking was negatively framed from day one. Also it was strongly hinted that they don’t work, there’s nothing we can do and the frail will fall regardless.

There have been no masks used here for most of the time I masked everywhere, the mask wearing only happened for the delta wave, but when the vaccinations began, they disappeared. “Expert” opinion has been very anti-mask and covid has been “just a cold” that only kills old people all along.

This whole thing has been my single biggest eye-opener to the fucked up fascist values I have actually grown up surrounded by. It has also made me understand that covid and covid protection is 100% a working class issue and a matter of class consciousness. It’s the workers like me who don’t get protected that die from it or get longcovid. Also lots of eugenist brainworms in my country.

This is a country where unironically one popular saying is “there’s still room behind the sauna” and this is supposedly a joke about how the undesirables used to be shot behind a sauna in our fash past and gets thrown around whenever someone for example does something dumb. We are the baddies actually and covid made me see this in its entirety, because the society I live in is behaving like monsters without even realizing it.

Iain M. Banks Terry Pratchett

Had a dream a few nights back where I was talking politics with my very centrist supposedly hippie “freedom man” dad while doing some kind of household chores, pretty sure it was dishes.

We went back and forth and his “suppressing my real emotions because emotions bad” face kept escalating until he finally said “You are one of those tankie types aren’t you.”

I just replied with: “Yes, yes I am and you should be too.”

A very therapeutic dream.

Hear hear, I will reply to your awesome reply better when I have more spoons. Just letting you know I really appreciate your thoughtful reply.

The subreddit Suomi or some such has gone full nazi long ago. My kid used to go and troll the libs there sometimes, but it got too dark after covid started and then Ukraine & nato. They went absolutely mask off.

Great analysis, subconscious guilt sounds correct. I tried to throw things like Tech Won’t Save Us-podcast and the book Surveillance Capitalism his way, but he kind of goes *ears shut those times.

And yes it’s funny because most of these guys see themselves as unravelers of the Matrix or whatever.

Tech is very much complicit to upholding capitalism imo, they seem to be the perfect match.

Yup. I also think there is a discussion to be had about “evidence-based” and the problem of science turning into a sort of religion.

Looking at the entire covid response where nothing could be done until it had been proven over and over again by one of the methods these types of guys see as valid.

I work a lot with narratives or otherwise less colonial research methods and typically these measures get discredited from the start. I think this is related to everything you pointed out there.

Yeah not settlers, but our country did dabbble with colonial complicity and oppression a lot.

Difference here is that it has fully never been reconciled with as we see ourselves as outsiders to the colonial project (we very much are not). This is why issues like racism are so hard to discuss here as people as a majority have a “I don’t see colour” mindset, this makes incredible space for fascism to thrive in plain sight.

I have already heard the ecofascism bubbling to the surface with this one for sure. He travelled and came back disgusted by the way the poors “treat their land”. So we did a stuggle session on living conditions and exploitation and all that.

He is like the entire IT sector here from the early 2000s up. I know several guys like him, they shop for jobs. Nordic country so this is a thing here, they have been on 5k monthly salaries since age 30 and buy houses with ease.

He has been able to develop many very unrealistic views of the labor market and worker power, told my partner who burnt out in a healthcare position that he should have voiced his complaints more, hahahaha. They live in a full bubble from everyone else here.

You are right, wish I had said that. He just tends to argument pretty aggressively and the entire question threw me a bit as he is covid aware himself. I sort of didn’t even know what to say.

I’ll make it clear next time it comes up, I am sure it will too. :D

This is a very good idea. I talk about things being social constructs with him all the time and he tends to get very frustrated with this, with the whole “but there has to be something concrete, something that is true”.

We are currently sort of stuck in the struggle session of Western media and bias, the way our worldview is indeed constructed and I do sympathize with the uncertainty that might come from being ok with most things not being black&white or clearly right or wrong. True or false etc. I told him that for me personally realizing this was freeing, he also called me a nihilist on that.

Problem is that when I make a comment about something like the LLMs from a social sciences pov he immeadiately dismisses it because I am not in tech and says “you don’t understand the threat because you don’t understand what AI is”. I try to explain that in the end your AI is just automation and statistics, not intelligence and he dismisses it.

For some reason the tech bro mindset produces people with exceptional confidence in their own understanding of the world and that is very hard to counter. But at the same time tech is working in the closest alliance with capitalism and imo it is the industry that is also doing a lot of class betrayal (unconscious as it may be). Which is why I think these are the people we would need to reach somehow.

Thank you for this response, it gave me a lot to think about. I am approaching this from Europe, the socdem north where the conflicts aren’t very clear to many and people are detached from the global struggle and also our part in it.

This was a park bench discussion with someone who has already made genuine progress in thinking in my view so I would not probably leave it unagitated even though that would be easier for me.

In the last year I have been able to secure work in the social sector with similar benefits as he has always had and I have been able to show by lived experience the difference in material conditions that happens when you become less poor. I always use words like class and remind him that we are all working class, this has stuck with him.

He on average has left the cryptostuff and Musk stuff and many other things behind over the years because of our somewhat often occuring struggle sessions and this gives me hope. But it puzzles me how he tends to always opt for the most reactionary option first and ask questions later. This seems common in guys like him.

What would you recommend as first reading of Marxist theory that relatively easily explains especially the cumulative nature of capital and class? I know he isn’t ever going to read something like Capital, it’s too much effort. I have thrown things like Secind Thought videos and the Deprogram and Blowback podcasts at him, but he enjoys living in the RadioLab bubble of social justice without class concsiousness. Not sure if he had ever really watched them.

I have myself started from the progressive “voting is key” social democratic view and not even that long ago, but am neurodivergent and have always been an agitator and very political, so diving straight into this was never difficult for me, more like “where had this stuff been all my life”. And I was already seeing myself as socialist, just had the Soviet bad and other red scare brainworms like pretty much everyone here has. But this guy and a lot of people like him prefer to be “apolitical” and disengage from all the things they see as negative or ruining their vibes. How would we counter that?

Yeah though it was pretty funny as well. My realist takes on infection protection are nihilist.

Thank you. This is probably it. He has never lost a job, but is in a position to bargain for the best spots and say no if he wants to. This makes for some interesting takes towards someone like me who has been poor for over 20 years and studies/works in humanities instead of tech.

He was also hyped about crypto and later told me that AI will destroy the world because Musk said so. His views on humans are very negative and have taken on a lot of the tech style “people are just complex computers” bs that results in all kinds of dehumanizing takes. This has then lead to a kind of steadfast belief that people are all simple and have no agency/power.

What worries me is that guys like this hold a lot of power in the way things get done and they see themselves as progressive leftists, genuinely.

He still gets very mad at me when I oppose his takes even a little, but I have managed to slide him leftwards over the years slowly.

Every time I end up in these struggle sessions with him, I feel sort of hopeless for days after as he seems to represent his intrest group pretty well. In my country this group is very large and has a hegemonic status currently.

The amount of habits and ability to manage stuff that comes with taking adhd is kind of ironic considering what having adhd is like.

I personally am hesitant to even try, late self-dx audhd who can’t really access even the diagnosis due to gender and the way neurodiversity is viewed for women. I know I embody the classic meme level audhd inattentive woman.

My child also didn’t have a great experience trying to fit in the neurotypical world with meds, I suppose this is a part of what made both of us go full in on communism. Having to suffer highs and lows and physical symptoms just to fit in the capitalist model of high performing citizens just sits wrong with me now.

But if there were less high stakes and more easily available options to try I am not saying it wouldn’t be nice to not burn out from everyday life. Just ended a 6 month work period and have now slept for a week straight and still eternally tired and down. I know why now, but it’s still not amazing. We can’t really choose to not take part either because we all need to eat and have housing.

What we did with my son was we got protein shakes and powders to have the easiest most accessible way to nutrients while he was medicated, it worked mostly (not always). It can get a bit expensive though, I know I struggled with buying those for every morning, but otherwise he would not eat at all, hates breakfast. In the end he decided to just be adhd and be supported in other ways for now, the demands on habits to be able to medicate were something he just couldn’t get done.

It did help him focus at school, but he told me later he also had some palpitations and heart things with them that he ignored as he wanted so much for the meds to “fix him”. He said he never really felt anything as such, but his mood did get less predictable and one of the meds made him dangerously depressed. But that can happen, something else might have been a better fit.

But afaik there was no “high” apart from mood changing a bit after he had been on them longer. Appetite he did struggle with as he already often forgets to eat. Same with hydration.

It’s a pretty big task to take on and navigate, all the solidarity for you in your journey

Yeah thinking I’ll just join the communist party here. They are a bit too capitalism friendly to my liking, but there I could also find a reading club for my currently solitary Marx reading.

You are right. Yet I did not go because I am just one person and I didn’t feel all that safe alone. I have a long history of being in the margins and getting bullied, so did not have the strenght this time.

Which is why I think the idea of the masses is so powerful, had I comrades here by my side it would feel a lot less risky.

Can’t but help to also think how succesful the division of everything has been because at the moment I don’t really even know where I could go to find my comrades in my area. There seemingly isn’t really any options that aren’t liberal, yet I know they must be somewhere. But hegemony is a helluva force.

I’ll try to find leftist folks next. Maybe I can get others to come with me next time.

I will also admit that my passion for these particular demonstrations wasn’t that high as these are folks doing this spesifically within parliamentary democracy who still think all this happened because the plebs voted wrong and if we just vote correctly, all will be ok again. It’s being outraged at the social justice stuff, not really for anything beyond that. But I did want to critically support this as they did mention workers rights and border policy, even if in passing.

Even then she was kind of doing her job for the capitalists. The partying was a part of her “it’s time to live” drive to minimize covid after many million euros making artists and other petty bourge had cried in the media for weeks about bringing concerts, gyms, festivals and restaurants back. This is very small country so some of these same people were in said parties.

The leather jacket was a propaganda look for nato, she was dressing for the part.

The speed in which she flipped on both covid and nato has been something to behold.

Visited a city I grew up in yesterday. It’s a very upper middle class, right wing & conservative place where all you see now is people having Ukraine flags propped up on their expensive house balconies.

What got me though was the big construction area that had been propped up in the city rivermouth, right on the seaside. These were being sold for the kind of euros nobody but the top 10% here has.

And all I could think about was how these people build these status houses and spend these fortunes on them, but because they are so attached to the status quo, nobody even mentions that this land will be in the sea, literally, in not so distant future. Probably before those mortages for those houses are paid.

This feeling of being just separated from the “reality” these folks choose to keep living in, it’s everywhere now. They just go on with the, I don’t even know what it is anymore. Denial isn’t a strong enough word for it.