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Wxnzxn
Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.
https://abnormalhumanbeing.itch.io/
https://www.youtube.com/@AbNormalHumanBeingsStuff
Just noticed that crossposting doesn’t display properly (yet) in Jerboa, so as an advertisement for the community: !truecomics@midwest.social
Basically this, but usually the best ideas come to me during smoke breaks instead. (Still trying to kick that addiction, don’t smoke, kids, I’ve managed to get rid of alcohol and other drugs I experimented with in the past, nicotine just won’t fucking stop with the fucking urges, even when you manage to “quit” for months at a time.)
EDIT: Oh, whooops, I genuinely misread the subreddit as being the autism memes one, I’ll still leave this one here, that rant felt too good to delete.
Yes, I feel this one so much. Only make it “in my thirties” - and I completely internalised my masking, leading to self-hatred and inability to properly overcome it. I got misdiagnosed with a whole slew of different disorders over the course of my life, too. Which made me try so fucking hard to do what is right and push myself again and again, only to break down into long phases of complete withdrawal, burnout and depression every damn time, even though I did “the right things” to overcome stuff like anxiety and depression. Now, to be fair, it’s correct to be noted that throughout that life, I also developed a personality disorder from internalising all those things I heard, being lazy, having to remain restrained in my behaviour at every moment, questioning and repressing every intuitive emotion out of fear of it being “wrong”.
I only very recently ended up being able to recontextualise all the prior shit in my life, am currently in a phase where I am reconnecting with my anger, which I had forbidden myself completely and repressed it deeply into my unconscious in my early teens, after having had daily aggressive meltdowns in my childhood, which led to both physical violence and deep shaming and essentialist shaming of me “being wrong” by my parents. And looking back at my life, considering I was in different kinds of psychological and psychiatric care almost my whole life, I simply don’t understand how no one even considered autism at any point. Yeah, sure, it was not as well known as today in all its details, but the more I reflect, the more things I discover in my past that were just clear signs even back then.
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.
I’ve done modding for Paradox games (never something for the public, but just for myself), and I’ve done game dev in Godot. I’d say modding of Paradox games like Stellaris is a lot more convenient. There are guides, too, and the lua scripts you will be working with are relatively intuitive in my opinion. Another advantage is, that you may have an easier time to gain an audience and feedback, as it already builds on something that has a lot of people playing it. But that is no guarantee, admittedly.