Oh, shit. Well I’m glad that I mentioned that last part then because I almost didn’t do it. I hope it turns out to be useful advice for you!

I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here entirely. Capitalism absolutely aggravates mental illness and it produces conditions that generate mental ill health.

But ascertaining the correct etiology of a condition doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the treatment. Say a person is experiencing liver failure due to alcoholism. The cause is alcoholism, the condition is liver failure, and yet the treatment remains the same whether or not it was alcoholism that brought about the condition.

In the same way, we can attribute much of psychiatric disorders to capitalism but, at least for the individual, the treatment remains the same.

I think we need to be cautious to avoid a puritanical attitude towards psychiatric meds. I could write a book based on my criticisms of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry and how they operate, however at the same time we shouldn’t discourage people from the appropriate use of medications to improve their wellbeing regardless of how ruthless and exploitative the pharmaceutical industry itself is. The system is going to be fucked whether or not someone has an appropriate medication regime for their mental health. The only difference is that one option means an improved quality of life.

It’s also important to keep in mind though that there are certain mental illnesses that do require an ongoing medication regime for maintenance and that this would persist under socialism. Schizophrenia and bipolar are two very obvious examples here. Even under fully automated luxury gay space communism, the overwhelming majority of cases of bipolar and schizophrenia are going to require ongoing medication regimes.

Unsolicited advice incoming but you rightfully put a lot of emphasis on the emotional dysregulation aspect of ADHD, which gets chronically overlooked.

Personally I have found that clonidine works really well for my experience of emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity. It’s a boring medication - typically it’s just used for lowering blood pressure and it’s quite safe and generally well tolerated. (Obviously stimulant medications increase your BP so taking something that reduces your BP as a side effect is actually beneficial in the long term.)

It might be something that is worth looking into for yourself given what you wrote here.

As a sidebar, I also experience PTSD and clonidine helps with managing my trauma response. One perk of the medication is that it’s fast acting and you don’t get major withdrawals from it so if I had a ton of trauma nightmares the night before or if I’m struggling with PTSD symptoms during the day for whatever reason, I can just increase my dose as needed on that particular day and it helps keep things manageable for me.

There needs to be further research on this but ADHD occurs in autistic people at an approximate rate of somewhere between 20-40%.

There’s very little out there about autism or ADHD for adults and almost nothing about comorbid autism and ADHD in adults.

Speaking anecdotally as someone who is autistic and an ADHDer, I fit into neither the ADHD nor the autism categories neatly. My ADHD traits often counterbalance my autistic traits and, likewise, my autistic traits often counterbalance my ADHD traits. (At least when they aren’t ganging up on me.) It’s very complex.

I’d call BE an eclectic Marxist tbh.

He definitely holds his fair share of ultra positions but he’s not actually an ultra; he mentioned that he considered Stalin to be 50/50 good/bad and Mao to be 70/30. An ultra wouldn’t say anything like that (despite my objections that those names at the least need to be swapped around; not to start a struggle session but Stalin made a lot of choices that were either under duress or the best of a bad set of options while Mao made some major fuckups all by himself, although I think both figures need higher ratings tbh.)

One thing that wasn’t mentioned in that post is that BE denied the fact that BA415 faced any credible threat because he wasn’t at risk of being killed after being doxed.

For one thing, I believe it was France that had its demographic data used to aid in identifying the people who were put into concentration camps and/or exterminated; just because your personal information is safe today under the current regime is no assurance that your personal information won’t be used against you tomorrow under different circumstances.

Another thing is that this is just completely false. It’s not a stretch to imagine that he might have been swatted and that during the swatting he could have gotten killed, either through typical Yankee cop negligence or by something more malicious and planned.

Last of all, being doxed can pose a significant threat to your safety and wellbeing without credible threats to your life. Just because nobody is coming around to your address to put a bullet in your head doesn’t mean that they aren’t ordering a barrage of pizzas at all times of the night, that people can’t threaten, intimidate, or harass you, that they can’t interfere with your job, that they can’t get you fired, evicted, or brought up on false charges etc.

I’d love to get BE to respond on stream to a question about why he keeps his identity and residence away from public knowledge because he’d immediately give half a dozen reasons why this is the case without needing a moment to think about it. It would really undermine this shitty hot take of his.

Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

This is the point where, if I was an organiser in the UK, I would start pushing really hard for raising awareness about how the watermelon is symbolic of support for Palestine and I’d start organising watermelon-based protests, including the strategic deployment of watermelons left at the entrances to Zionist organisations.

If they want to push demonstrations for Palestine underground, so be it. Getting arrested as a prisoner of conscience in the UK isn’t going to serve the interests of Palestinians.

But imagine how fragile and absurd the Zionists would look if they tried to suppress the celebration of watermelons and public watermelon eating events or if people started getting brought up on terrorism charges for “accidentally” leaving a shopping bag with a watermelon on the steps of buildings.

Not only would judges be virtually forced to throw out any charges laid against people for this stuff but it would be an absolute media coup to have big Zionist organisations playing victim by cowering in terror at a watermelon left on their steps.

To be fair, I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot that you’d be able to do to that car with a hammer that this driver hadn’t already done themselves.

Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you’re in that 16-25yo bracket.

With that in mind and from what you’ve said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)

It’s just a wild hunch so I’m not going to go into the why of it but it’s just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.

Ah, I found it!

It’s called "Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology”

I haven’t read it so I can’t promise anything but it might be a good place to start at the least.

So a lot of this is going to be contextual - how important the friendship is, how deep he has gone into the manosphere, how long he’s been in it etc.

I’m going to approach this from the assumption that it’s a long-game situation and that you care about the person deeply. Pretty much everything applies from this but whether you choose to maintain the friendship or whether you decide to end the friendship or you aren’t willing to invest as much into this project as it demands is your prerogative.

Basically in a long-game situation your primary concern will be to always maintain the relationship and lines of communication. If you don’t have those two fundamental factors, you will be unable to effect any change.

What this means is that you will almost certainly need to be judicious in what you choose to push back on and when you decide to do it. What this looks like, in practice, is letting things slide by if they do not serve your overall goals. I’m not saying that you have to tacitly or even implicitly support their opinions but if you are skilful about it you can make asides to voice dissent without dragging something down into a debate. Throwaway lines like “I don’t really see it that way” or “That doesn’t track with my experience” before carrying on the conversation are going to be important here.

Your friend has almost certainly taken the trauma of a breakup and turned it into manosphere bullshit. What this means is he likely feels lost, powerless, abandoned, disillusioned etc. and the manosphere narratives are assuaging these underlying feelings. You will need to approach your interactions with him in a way that does not threaten him or aggravate these feelings of powerlessness etc. because if you position yourself as a threat to the beliefs which give him a sense of security and power then you will aggravate the underlying causes for him falling to the manosphere and you will almost certainly make him dig deeper into the manosphere as a way of bolstering himself.

You will need to walk the tightrope of being a friend to him while not being an ally to his beliefs. You will have to demonstrate that you will not abandon him and that you are not going to force him into positions where he feels powerless. But at the same time, you cannot endorse his beliefs and you will need to get him to trust you enough that he expresses these opinions to you and then to trust you enough to let you explore these opinions in regards to validity, consequences, implications etc.

This is where the real work takes place. You need to be delicate and engaged while also holding a position of detachment - if you treat these discussions where you explore his beliefs from an antagonistic angle or where you are heavily invested in it emotionally, it’s going to result in arguments and shutting down and similar counterproductive outcomes.

Essentially, you want to get him to move from a totalising narrative such as “All women are b*tches” to something which has nuance, even if it isn’t a complete reversal. This might mean that when he says something like this and you have decided that it’s appropriate to challenge it in that moment, you could reflect that he doesn’t treat his mom/sister/etc. as if that statement is true. Then you want to explore this apparent contradiction and use dialogue to open up space to compare, reflect, challenge, and further explore.

If, over time, he moves from “All women are b*tches” to something like “Most women are…” or “Women can be…” then that’s progress, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Keep on chipping away at these values by exploring them, gently countering them (especially with real-world examples), and ultimately getting him to question the narratives himself.

It’s kinda hard to give a clear procedural roadmap to how you would go about challenging someone’s beliefs because it’s all so contextual but I hope this is a starting point for you. And I just want to give you a caution that if you approach interactions with your friend from the position of “I’m right and he’s wrong, he needs to learn from me so that he can see my point of view and why I’m right”, you’re never going to make progress. You have to be humble, open, curious, and most of all gentle.

Good luck with it.

There was an academic work mentioned in a recent Cosmopod episode Between the Market and the Plan. It was a very brief mention in regards to the shifting sexual mores in the USSR.

Unfortunately the title of the work wasn’t very descriptive nor catchy so I can’t recall it now. And of course the episode is 3 hours long. I’ll try to dig up the reference and get back to you about it.

Just to contribute to this point with something to reflect upon:

During the (laughably titled) “Red Vienna” era, when SocDems ran the city, the government built high quality housing blocks for the working people, which would house one tenth of the city’s entire population.

Rent in these blocks was around 4% of a working class income.

Are you pulling in more cash than a Viennese worker in the 1932, dollar-for-dollar (adjusted)? Probably.

Are you spending somewhere from 25-75% of your income on housing alone, making you effectively worse off than that Viennese worker in 1932? Again, probably.

When you crunch the rawest of numbers you can get some really skewed ideas about what the reality is. Statistics lie.

Here are some good podcast episodes from Actually Existing Socialism that cover the GDR if you want a bit of an introduction:

East Germany: Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? w/Bruni de la Motte

The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 1) w/ Victor Grossman

The American Soldier Who Defected to East Germany (Part 2) w/ Victor Grossman

What Has Socialism Ever Done For Women? w/ Julia Mead (This is a bit more tangential)

Writings available from the authors here:

Stasi State Or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and what Became of it by Bruni De la Motte and John Green

Victor Grossman’s autobiographies

What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women? Reflections on Women’s Emancipation in the Eastern Bloc by Julia Mead and Kristen Ghodsee

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Kristen Ghodsee

Okay, for note-taking I think there are a few critical things to do:

1. Write down explanations of terms/names which you don’t implicitly understand the meaning of. Lenin is dragging Kautsky but you don’t know why or what Kautsky represented? Cool. Figure it out via Wikipedia, searching r*ddit, making a question here or on Hexbear about it etc. and write a summary of what “Kautsky” symbolises.

2. Write down questions and assumptions as they come up. “SPD will later betray the KPD” or “How does the SPD rationalise their collaboration with the Nazis? Is Thällman right about ‘social fascism’?”

3. Highlight key points and takeaways from the text. Stuff like interesting quotes, important details, the key learnings etc. All the stuff that you would put into a summary of the book if you needed to, basically.

4. You don’t have to do this in the book itself. You might want to write things down on a notepad or type it up in a word document. Depending on how in-depth you’re going, you may want to even go so far as to make it into something resembling a draft of an essay. Note that the very exercise of writing things out will reinforce your learning process so it doesn’t even need to be a permanent document tbh.

I’m also in favour of going ham on annotating books because what use is a book if it goes unused?

The purpose of a book is to be read and to be used as a tool for learning, so use it as it’s been designed.

My caveat here would be for books which are first editions or extremely rare ones but that aside, use it as you will.

If you still don’t feel comfortable with that then you can use a pencil so that your annotations are erasable or you can buy sticky inserts that are transparent overlays which you can use to write onto which doesn’t cause any permanent impact on the book itself.

As for how you take notes, it depends on what your purpose is. I’m going to chew on this question and respond to it in another reply once I’ve mustered the brainpower.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That’s really rough.

I’m sorry but I really can’t think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

Unionise, organise, agitate, educate. Same as it has always been.

We are helpless alone but together we are strong.

You might consider learning a second language and getting tf out of the dumpsterfire that is the US preemptively though. Vietnam pays good cash for people who do english tutoring for businesspeople. Maybe you can do that “digital nomad” (*shudders*) thing too.