I’m in a similar situation. In November 2024, my wife left me. (We were together for twelve years), and with her, all of my local found family were stripped away. I’ve since tried to get involved in activism against the current regime (in the United States), but most fronts want me to be able to organize and host events and insist I should bring my friends. Well, I don’t have any friends.

(Off topic, I’m getting the sneaking suspicion political organization is essentially salesmanship, but for social causes or candidates for public office rather than products.)

I’m spectrum AF and suffer from major depression and tend to want to not engage someone if I suspect they’re busy or disinterested. I’m also super awkward in activity groups unless I understand the protocol already and know what I’m doing.

As such, I’m isolated in Midtown, Sacramento and am unbearably lonely much of the time. I’ve resorted to virtual support groups (via Zoom) but those are not the same.

Making friends is hard!

One article pointed out it takes $200 for a date, while another points out Zoomers are just not having that much sex, nor are they into romantic relationships.

Maybe if you work a people too hard and give them no hope for a future; if they can’t afford to have a life, they may not want to have kids.

The media (and the public) didn’t take OWS seriously because they didn’t have a solution (even though they had specific legislation in mind, and were protesting the bailouts that ran inconsistent with capitalist theory: Socialism for large corporations but not for the public)

Eventually, the street cameras were turned off and the police brutally dispersed the OWS gathering. (Granted, it was getting unsanitary, but that didn’t justify brutality).

Then Trump got elected, who undid what meager financial regulations were made. And then again, at which point Trump and his cronies started openly engaging in material corruption while the whole federal government seeks to secure GOP rule and a one-party state.

Short of some vast miracle (e.g. a 2026 blue wave that can override vetos and filibusters, combined with Democratic candidates-elect giving up their corporate donors and growing a spine and a will to serve the public) the GOP is going to control the Executive and the Senate in 2028 and will have total control, including domination of all the southern states in 2030.

At that point, only force, either general strikes or violence, will push the Republicans out. Which may eventually happen, since the GOP doesn’t bother with doing anything in the public interest.

The world started getting really terrible around Trump’s first term and I just kept getting more and more depressed. I went from blogging a couple times a week to once a month to not at all.

He’s trying to fuck the whole world, and is getting pretty far.

Unchecked, power consolidates. – Barry from Barry’s Economics

Karl Marx also said approximately as much in Das Kapital

Actually the centrists are right-wing. Social Democrats are centrist compared to mainstream Europe, but even EU nations have drifted rightward thanks to neoliberalism.

Capitalism ruins everything.

No war but class war.

I’ve been trying to get involved in activism in order to stop MAGA from taking the US midterms by force (see Louisiana v. Callais ruling by SCOTUS and then all the southern states redistricting mid-election).

Election-focused activism is canvassing, and interrupting people’s lives by cold-calling people would be soul-crushing work. I could write postcards but my left-handed handwriting scrawl is awful.

Visibility activism is going out into loud crowds. I’m scared of large crowds generally. Large screaming / chanting crowds are overwhelming.

Noncooperation activism involves civil disobedience and the willingness to confront law enforcement (or ICE / CBP) and risk brutality from the same. Also they want young people on the front line, and I’m way old.

All of them would really rather I just give them a lot of money, and I’m low income.

Then there’s the infighting in the Democratic party, since the DNC and DCCC only support center-right establishment candidates, and progressive socialist candidates are the ones that actually inspire the youth to get out and vote, but good luck getting them support by the mainstream party.

And then there’s that daunting feeling that there’s nothing for SCOTUS which suffers no consequences when the conservative Federalist-Society supermajority drops rulings that strip away civil rights or kill public protections or destroy democratic features. Reform takes a long time and requires the left to take power first (and then – since we’re talking establishment Democrats – being willing to pass SCOTUS reforms)

The organizers who’ve hosted meetings so far insist we’ll campaign harder, but we have to win by unquestionable margins or expect challenges to the election results. And the Democrats campaigned harder in the 2024 general and lost to the trillion-dollar far-right propaganda machine that churns out fear and rage and prejudice.

So I’m having a hard time not despairing, and other than writing crabby letters to my representatives (which feels like shouting into the void), I can’t seem to find a role to play in the resistance.

So I’m feeling discouraged AF.

Never Again, for some people means we never tolerate genocide again, nowhere, no how.

And for other people Never Again, means never to us again.

Here

Unchecked, power consolidates. Marx notes in Das Kapital the Capitalist will always seek to capture regulatory bodies in the name of profit.

The goal, thus, becomes to distribute political power (including wealth) as diffusely and evenly as possible, and create a system that checks efforts from outside to attack and break its integrity.

The USSR was beleaguered from the beginning by sanctions by the rest of the western world, as pressured by President Wilson. As problematic as the Leninist model was, we don’t know how it would have fared if it were left to engage with the world on its own terms.

Considering his continuous use of the Sleepy Joe epithet for Biden (who was far, far from this sleepy), it really highlights the notion that every accusation is a confession.

The cult leader always is excepted to his own rules.

The Reddit API situation brought me here. It’s a much nicer crew.

That bible experts cannot agree on what the bible means, and which of its doctrine is important, makes for a strong argument that it is a historical document, neither inspired, nor univocal, nor inerrant.

If it were divine, then its meaning would be clear beyond debate.

In other words, it’s just a bunch of mythology invented by dudes in the bronze age, and nothing more.

I don’t know who wrote the characters. Some developers in Ubisoft in the early 2010s, I presume. Looking at the extensive credits, I never found a name that I recognized.

It could all be coincidence, but there’s a significant amount of similarity.

In Watch Dogs 2 the initial hackerspace is in the basement of a game store in the lower Haight in San Francisco, which smacks smartly of Gamescape on Divisadero Street between Oak and Fell. It’s still there according to Google, even though everything around it was gentrified out of existence, including the cheap flat I lived in.

I’m pretty sure my years as a Gamescape regular inspired the character Josh Sauchak. I lived with the woman who probably inspired Sitara Dhawan, and we are pretty sure of the identity of the guy who inspired Wrench.

In March 2026, I learned I’m not just ASD but spectrum AF according to a psychiatric assessment. It explains a lot, including why I find dealing with people super awkward. Right now I’m isolated where I live trying to figure out how to make friends when I super-suck at making friends or even being social.

I’ve been thinking of starting off with Don’t mind me, I’m spectrum AF as soon as the flow of conversation stops because I said something awkward (or didn’t say the expected thing, or whatever).

I suffer from major depression and have since I was a kid. I was diagnosed at fifty to be ASD and a recent assessment in March confirmed I’m spectrum AF.

I worked for a few years and was nearly driven to suicide and have been on disability ever since. Not a bad thing. All my career hopes either required education and credentials I couldn’t ever afford to acquire, or had spirit-crushing consequences (e.g. crunching, which practically all video-game developers are required to suffer).

We often have better perspective regarding other people’s troubles than we do our own.

We’re also often still wrong about it, anyway.

To paraphrase Bill Nye, eye protection on; if you raise the cost of fossil fuels, fewer people will use them; eye protection off.