You know what makes it even sadder? While propaganda does play a huge part of it, from all that we can gather information-wise, a vast majority is motivated by abject poverty and lack of perspectives in life instead of jingoist enthusiasm.

They have been beaten down and dehumanised by the system first, given a bleak and cynical outlook on life and themselves - and then basically been offered money for suicidal operations, most likely benefitting their relatives unless they manage to “win the lottery” and come back home alive.

There’s a very real risk this will become the future of recruitment in Western nations as well, so we really should not turn off our empathy, even though I will never understand how they can charge forward into pants-shitting terror like this, instead of either surrendering or downright fragging their commanders in open mutiny.

So, I recently learned about my own autism, also in my 30s, and I have begun the process of consciously unmasking quite recently - not a lot of experience yet.

What I’ve been doing is using my overactive self-reflection that was honed from going undiagnosed and being high-masking, to analyse where I might have been masking, what behaviour I might have done just to fit a specific role. For example, today I accepted some cake that a friend advertised in a group chat, that no one else seemed to want. In hindsight, while it was delicious, I was neither hungry for it, nor did I want to deal with the stress of him coming over to deliver it. But when I reflected on it, I realised I actually did this because I had internalised it as behaviour that is conducive to social connection, and “what is expected of me” when someon offers cake, even when I now very much feel the stress of having been interrupted by the offer, by accepring it, by getting myself ready to leave my apartment, actually going outside to meet up, the smalltalk involved, walking with a cake through the street afterwards. All stuff that actually stressed me out quite a lot.

While waiting for him outside, I allowed myself to close my eyes, listen to music and rythmitically drum on my thighs consciously - something that I know I repressed completely before, without even knowing. Unlike in the decades before, I also did not focus on thoughts of self-loathing like “why is something so simple so hard for you? What the hell is wrong with you?”, consciously pushing thoughts and feelings like that away as best I could.

At the moment, I am very much still sorting what even is behaviour that comes to me intuitively from “myself” and what is a mask - mostly by reflecting on the amounts of stress and overstimulation I feel after the fact, and then trying to consciously avoid the things that I realise, after the fact, were most likely long internalised masking behaviour.

That all being said, I also try to appreciate my masks as something I can go back to as a talent, when the tradeoff of their use is worth the additional stress. Being able to speak publicly, being able to look people in the eyes/face if needed, and other things, are good to have in some situations.

I feel that, I am currently on a waiting list for an official diagnosis I managed to organise with the help of my current psychiatrist. For me, here in Germany, I searched for “adult autism diagnostic” on maps, and it gave me a clinic with a department a few kilometres away in a big city, with their waiting list being roughly a year long.

Resources for autistic adults are super scarce, considering how many undiagnosed people have gone undiscovered from lack of awareness in the past decades.

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.

Mix of terror bombing, probing escalation and reactions internationally and demonstrating that they can do as they please, crushing hope within and outside their influence. The usual cynical Realpolitik shit, with a dash of sadistic, immature enjoyment of power on the psychological side.

I mostly try to avoid sugar and eat mostly vegetarian/vegan (with supplements), lots of beans, chickpeas and the like. In the past, I thought I noticed some sensitivity to gluten, but I was never 100% sure about it - sucks, because pasta is so cheap and versatile. Also some fish and seafood from time to time.

There is a real risk of spiraling into unhealthy and expensive habits for me, when I get into a phase where leaving the house is hard or impossible for me, where I then order junk food after not eating for sometimes more than a day at a time, so I try to keep large amounts of canned, dried and frozen food at the ready.

That is very interesting to read - I only learned quite recently that I have been autistic my whole life (in my third decade of life), and in the past, I had been wondering if I had some sort of gluten sensitivity, as I had noticed my psyche sometimes getting quite wonky after eating gluten-heavy meals.

While I agree, they most certainly will still try their damnedest to avoid it. From illegal stuff like tax fraud, to trying stuff like officially “moving” their workplace to a tax haven, while still living in France. There would definitely be more class warfare to be had, even after this were to pass (which they of course will fight tooth and nail against)

Current projections for the parliament:

Mélenchon seems to be aiming to be the head of a left minority government, the question would be, what can be done with a parliament split into thirds, but it is a good sign for the moment

In the military, you don’t start unions, you frag your officer and either defect or get a critical mass of mutiny going.

Unless ideology has beaten you into submission and obedience - then you ask politely to be treated better. It’s just sad seeing this, really.

EDIT: I wonder if they ever watched Battleship Potemkin…

Yes, you raise a very important point that I completely glanced over with sleep-deprived tunnel vision brain. Young males are a group, where ideological factors are a lot more prevalent. A constant barrage of presenting the desirable thing to be succesful - everything from sexual gratification to security in life depends on it - is given to, well, actually everyone, but even today still predominately young males. In addition, the ideological explanation presents no proper “out” that has analytical value: If you don’t succeed, you are just some sort of beta cuck or whatever. How about you buy this course by this YouTube influencer, on how to get money and pussy by changing your own inadequacy, which of course in reality throws the vast majority of their fans into dependence and diminishes any resources they had.

This demand to be succesful, dominant, happy and stoic, weighing on the superego as basically an old dream of success that is becoming more and more unattainable but is still presented everywhere, is also in conflict with material reality. Being the breadwinner of a household where you have a wife that delivers reproductive labour and sexual gratification to you, while you earn the money and keep her dependent? Even with chauvinists that are deep into that ideological prison, households being able to earn enough money without both people working (often even more than two jobs) is not what we are seeing in the present and the future. So, this discrepancy has to be explained in a way, that is compatible with their ideology.

As a side note: parts of the liberal, more well-off “left” (a very relative term here) will basically just give them the answer “well, you are a stupid, low-IQ chud loser, so its your own fault” - basically reinforcing the very “sink or swim, be succesful, if you can’t be, it means something about you is wrong” ideology that creates this whole mess to begin with.

But of course, the answer many will then land on is a variant of my previous post: It worked in the past, right? An outside malevolent force must have corrupted this. It’s the feminists. It’s the Jews. It’s the insert enemy here. That is the core of it again - discrepancy between material reality and ideological demands and dreams within society. Concerning young men, the extreme right also has good illusionary ways to provide them with a sense of being powerful when they are in reality not, through violence that doesn’t threaten the upper classes, and relative privilege within their ideological stratified view of reality.

Ironically, that material reality of proletarisation can even fuel “tradwife” romanticism for some women - basically, the dream of being a loved and loving housewife, being submissive to and dependent on their husband and his income, anything, just to escape the dread of having to work under current conditions without any of the security of the past. (Note that actual submissive impulses that people potentially have as a fetish are a whole other thing in that discussion, but it is relevant, that for some submissive people at least, that can of course also add to the allure of that fantasy, just as the idea of being a breadwinner that has a dependent person giving them sexual gratification and admiration is alluring to people with dominant fetishisations)

So, I am heading to bed for the night, because I have been awake all night and day and the day before to catch the debate - but the short answer is: The decline of the middle class and the petite burgeoisie - which I in this case view not in the traditional definition, but also broader, as all the people owning a little bit of capital i.e. savings for old age in some fond or maybe a house of their own. Also the disappearance of job security and stable work relations.

With it, the conservative “lets keep things as they were” mindset of people who had a decent enough life, i.e. mostly boomers that lived through the economic growth phase of the post-war era, but also younger people dreaming of that time or having profited from it through their parents, comes into crisis. But as this mindset argues from its own experience, it dreams of the past (“Things worked back then, right?”), while missing, that the very same “working” system was what had within it, already the inherent nature that eventually led to it decaying around us. So they need to explain the decline as something caused by an outsider, a malevolent force.

At the same time, this decline of the middle class leads them to try and grasp to divisions that might “save” them from proletarisation - becoming properly dependend on paycheck to paycheck and owning nothing but their own labour power to sell on the market. So, racism for example - if you are white, you might just be spared from the above fate. And you can kick down, targeting all those brown people below instead of punching up - the latter is a lot more risky after all. And the people up above can’t be at fault, after all, you (or the people you heard about from the past) had a great life when those were around, right? It just have to be the “right” people, like you and the people of your nationality/race/religion/other ingroup - often depressingly arbitrary.

This is still a very reductive summary, a lot is missing, globalisation, how it relates to the net rate of profit, how consolidation happens, details about the ideology of our current times. But broken down to it’s basics it can be summarised as such. The middle class is disappearing as a consequence of capitalist development, which leads to them becoming panicky and diving headfirst into ideology.

Well, anyway, good night, hope it was possible to understand what I was trying to bring across in my rambling

Yeah, while the republicans have basically openly moved to reactionary and fascist politics, thus implicitly accepting the status quo is over, the influential parts of the Democrats seem to have been clinging completely to the idea that the status quo is what is to be preserved - even though material reality will not make that possible.

Right now, we seem to be in a historical moment, where old privileges are breaking away from a continuing crisis in capitalism that basically has been smouldering since the (late) 70s and kept stable through neoliberal policies thus far. Old privileges being lost results in a reactionary shift worldwide at the moment. It will be harrowing, but there is at least always the possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way - right now, in the coming years, organisation, connecting people, openly presenting radical alternatives to prepare for that moment seems to be the most important work to me.

You know, as much as one has to keep Machiavellian machinations and Realpolitik in mind… Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Biden did not do well. They report about it in a way that gives them clicks. There is no plan.

Ah, sad, thank you for researching! Here’s hoping it will come back in some form.

Yeah, I think at this point it’s all speculation central. Where did you hear the guy who shot him cited “because he stopped sending arms to Ukraine” as a motive, though? I only heard talk of him citing general discontent with the government, and a quote claiming he brought up the upcoming public broadcast reforms in Slovakia so far. Genuinely interested.

One way or the other, at this point, everything still seems possible: from a useful idiot for Putin, a false flag coordinated - maybe with blackmail or something - by Russia, a mental illness, the gunman genuinely wanting to support Ukraine in a misguided way (even though it’s rare, yes, 180° turns in a few years are possible, especially in unstable people), or no direct relation to the war at all in his motives - it’s still impossible to tell.

I also haven’t heard of the journalist that brought the connection up or VS Square before myself, so, hard to say how trustworthy they are. But it sounds to be well-cited and founded at least.

Yeah, I’m pretty happy with the sorting algorithm in general for the way content gets presented, but some weighting to better include smaller communities would be great. Lemmy is still struggling with getting a critical mass in users to support niche interests, and a better post sorting could help a bit at least.

I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.

“Journalists”

Related: His q&a session after the failed coup