Wow I was unaware of that day. I don't know very much about the religion. Thanks for the article, the pilgrimage sounds pretty cool.
the Arba'in pilgrimage was banned by the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein (r. 1979–2003)
Wow up until getting to that point I was reading about the significance of the tradition and it sounded so cool and then apparently he did that. That was like such whiplash. I was like wait he did what?? No wonder they didn't like him, damn.
In fact, I think I’m going through the despair part at the moment.
It really had to happen for me at that point because
::: spoiler CW: suicide
I could not tolerate being alive if the truth was that a better world simply isn't possible, and I will be forced to live in this horrible dystopia until I die. In that state, I figured why should I live in this wretched, wicked world of capitalist realism? Why not expedite my death, then? I should just simply die now and spare myself the inevitable endless suffering. It was the realization that: yes, a better world is possible, because it HAS been done before!! (USSR etc) that saved my mental state and gave me a more solid foundation for coping with life.
:::
In marxist terminology, I could no longer tolerate the contradictions of liberalism in my mind.
I relate to a lot of this, and I do wonder if it's an autism thing. Because like, I see a lot of lefties complain about libs as if they know they're thinly veiled fascists and are just pretending/virtue signaling etc, and they're always linking roderic day's thing about propaganda. But my experience was just nothing like that. It's like.... no, I literally just did not know lol. I always had good egalitarian-like values, and I was fed so much bullshit that I was just naively a liberal. I was a radlib for sooooo long because of all the other western 'leftists' being stuck in electoralism, defeatism, 'human-nature'-ism etc. The final thing that pushed me here was:
Wait, you mean communism ISN'T when no food?
Wait, you mean communism actually DID work and wasn't just a 1984 animal farm dictatorship ???
Wait, you mean it wasn't us libbies on the "right side of history", it was always the socialists, and basically every good historical 'great man' idol that we look up to (MLK, helen keller, einstein etc) was a socialist too??
THE COMMIES WERE RIGHT THIS WHOLE FREAKIN TIME????
Because my entire life I've been taught commie = evil, like, they're just The Bad Guys. It's drilled into your head. And then when you come up with something like "hey why don't we provide for everybody and make things fair?" it's always: "Nah, that doesn't work, it's been tried, and human beings are just too selfish to make it work."
And that had younger me like "Oh, okay... :( "
And our entire culture, media, news, history education etc is SUCH A FUCK that it took THIS LONG for me to finally get some real facts and be like wtf are you kidding me?!?!? The "villains" were right this whole time?!?!
Maybe it is like an autistic myopia for us. Maybe most people aren't like this...? I know it's more accurate that people's ideology follows their material interests, and for most of us westoids, our material interests are the empire staying an empire. And you could say that because I'm disabled, that means my material interests 100% align with the abolition of capitalism, therefore here I am. But there's definitely an element of like, bruh I did not KNOW. I wish somebody had told me sooner. But it's a wasteland out here in the west. I ultimately had to figure it out for myself.
And I'm glad I did, because unknowingly being a "communist waiting for permission to be one" is depressing as HELL man. I saw the BS of electoralism, reforms obviously were not working, I knew the necessity of revolution but I could NOT believe that it was ever possible, like the belief that humans are selfish and it just never works was so ingrained. So I literally felt like there was no hope. Absolutely nothing. We're just fucked and this is it and we're powerless to do anything about it. Total capitalist realism. The bleakest view of reality. Did you also go through this phase of utter despair like I did?
Do they just... not understand that we're an evil empire funding/arming these "foreigners" for their genocide so we can stay an empire or what?
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't understand that, cuz I didn't either until recently. The whole US education and propaganda apparatus really makes you just think that we're a strong powerful country but that we don't directly do imperialist/colonial shit, and that the reason the world is in turmoil is local problems etc.
Still though, even before I understood this dynamic, in the face of an actual genocide I would feel compelled for us to "do something" about it, like literally anything.
It being a settler colonial state means that a sufficient reform of its structure would no longer resemble what the United States of America looks like anymore, and so, it would cease to exist
Sorta like Israel. If you fixed its issues it wouldn't be a Jewish ethnostate doing genocide anymore, so then it wouldn't be Israel anymore. It could just be Palestine with everybody living in it.
America's really big though so there would be land given back to lots of indigenous groups, possibly breaking up into smaller countries, etc.
I don't genuinely feel bad for Genocide Joe but seeing that old man with dementia triggers my brain's empathy response since I've worked with lots of patients who had it and my own grandmother had it as well. But then he has so much blood on his hands and I despise him. It's a weird feeling. Honestly, it's such a horror show seeing them prop up this rotting corpse. It makes me nauseous.
It really shouldn't be like this and I think it did permanent damage to me, I'm like a skittish indoor cat now. Been trying to enjoy the outside more but I don't think I'll ever be at that level. My parents made me so anxious and nervous with their paranoia and worries.
Yup, my gen x dad wouldn't even let me take a walk on our street just to get some exercise and fresh air, because he thought I would be kidnapped and SA'd. Kidnapping has never even happened in our town before.
Meanwhile, teachers, cops, and even the fire chief were caught messing with minors or having CSAM on their computer. But I was "safe" at school! And "safe" at home with my abusive step mother. Gen x chud dads are really something else.
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this way. It seems to be so common to not have physical descriptions, that I was wondering if this was normal and I was the weird one for being so visual. There are some people with aphantasia, after all. I can see if they want you to use your imagination, but then you can't just suddenly mention something half way through the book that totally messes up my mental image! Ugh. Books are basically mental movies playing in my brain while I read. It's jarring to have to recast suddenly in the middle of the movie.
Late-stage capitalism really has this neo-feudalistic feel, where the Kings and Lords (Musk etc) have a bunch of concubines with bastard children who have claims to the throne or whatever. Fuckin weird timeline.
Joe Biden has succeeded in creating more wealth for the rich than any of his predecessors has ever managed, and this is why he, not Trump, will have the full backing of the bourgeois class.
So this is basically like, petit bourgeois (Trump) vs. mega bourgeois (Biden) right? Do you think Trump might actually go to jail for that reason? Because the mega bougies are more powerful? (or are they?)
This might sound silly but I tried it as a little kid and it was sooooo hard to push the pedals for whatever reason that it completely turned me off from the whole idea. And I was also only allowed to basically ride around in tiny circles in our driveway because all we have in our area is narrow roads with no sidewalks where people drive their dodge rams at 50mph around corners. And it's still like that where I live now so yeah.
![Red_Eclipse [she/her]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/603d24c1-35f9-47a6-a5d5-ee2af9b44c7c.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Wow I was unaware of that day. I don't know very much about the religion. Thanks for the article, the pilgrimage sounds pretty cool.
Wow up until getting to that point I was reading about the significance of the tradition and it sounded so cool and then apparently he did that. That was like such whiplash. I was like wait he did what?? No wonder they didn't like him, damn.