I would love to train a martial art actually. I used to do combat sports way back when, but nowadays martial arts are so cost prohibitive. It’s nearly $200 a month for local martial arts classes in my area, and as a college student with no job I can’t afford that. I wouldn’t feel good putting it on my parent’s dime either, so the only option is my already extant home gym my dad bought many years ago.

Trying to determine whether this is the tasty and delicious mushroom of blood pressure regulation and joy or the anus bleeder 9000 of horrific hallucinations and death while the drones are closing in

In a way that same image (not from here, I saw that shit in an anarchist subreddit months ago) is what led me to make this post. I’ve also never forgotten it. Currently I just am struggling with any form of motivation to get back in the gym, as my original motivations were rooted in patriarchal, insecure bourgeois nonsense, and now I struggle to do much except put flab on lol. I suppose this should be the sign to actually do something assisting the revolution, in some small way, and motivate me to do better.

Stay strong comrade 💪

Yellow Parenti is the affectionate name given to Parenti’s 1986 lecture given at the University of Colorado Boulder (or if you prefer the invidious link), a staunchly pro-AES, anti-imperialist lecture. The real name of the lecture is US Interventionism, the Third World, and the USSR (transcript). If there is someone who you are trying to sway from liberalism, who will be willing to consume in good faith, this is what you show them. Honestly, I would go as far as showing them this as nearly the first step in their deprogramming. It is almost a compressed version of B&R and is an excellent presentation of some of the gaping holes in the Western narrative. With how allergic most of the politically unenlightened are to reading, it’s quite useful to have a 1.5 hour video that can really make people think with language that is extremely approachable.

I suppose I shouldn’t have looked at it like it was going to be unapologetically pro-AES the same way that I understand the phrase today. The book is great for deprogramming newcomers from what I have seen so far: much more approachable language than most texts, well-sourced, and the opinions are most certainly easier to digest for a newcomer. Probably isn’t the best for my experience to be reading this just after finishing Dialectical and Historical Materialism and while halfway through Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. I do like Parenti though, yellow Parenti’s speech is an indispensable resource, and over all he seems to be an amazing author and orator to have in your deprogramming tool kit.

This is probably the more accurate way to look at the situation. Older communists—especially those who lived through the red scare—will, unfortunately always be marred by the material conditions of their time, in some way shape or form, in the formulation of many of their opinions. In more extreme examples of it than Parenti, Marx and Stalin were products of their time in many ways, it will likely happen to many of us in the future (the most obvious thing I see being a ‘Stalin was homophobic’ or a ‘Marx was antisemetic’ of the future will be ‘FinnTheComrade ate factory farmed meat’ lol).

Side not: how do you figure that Irving Stone thing even happened? Was it not historical context of the time for Communists and Liberals to be mortal enemies like they are now? Interesting.

Added (both) to the reading list! Thank you for the recommendation comrade.

I understand that, but I don’t need confirmation that everything is going to be okay. On the contrary, I believe it is likely that things will only get worse for me from here on out, but that it will bring us a chance to do what must be done, and so it is worth it. I fully acknowledge that I may die or be imprisoned in the future due to being an ML, but what I really made this post about was, I think, the feeling of my own impotence at the moment in my life. I think it is probably best to take what pleasure I can from concrete things, though.

Thank you very much for this video, comrade. It helped me quite a lot in getting a hold upon my own revolutionary optimism.