Buy a genuine Palestinian kufiya and wear it to show solidarity with Palestinians while enraging any nearby Zionists.

This is the point where, if I was an organiser in the UK, I would start pushing really hard for raising awareness about how the watermelon is symbolic of support for Palestine and I’d start organising watermelon-based protests, including the strategic deployment of watermelons left at the entrances to Zionist organisations.

If they want to push demonstrations for Palestine underground, so be it. Getting arrested as a prisoner of conscience in the UK isn’t going to serve the interests of Palestinians.

But imagine how fragile and absurd the Zionists would look if they tried to suppress the celebration of watermelons and public watermelon eating events or if people started getting brought up on terrorism charges for “accidentally” leaving a shopping bag with a watermelon on the steps of buildings.

Not only would judges be virtually forced to throw out any charges laid against people for this stuff but it would be an absolute media coup to have big Zionist organisations playing victim by cowering in terror at a watermelon left on their steps.

This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you’re in that 16-25yo bracket.

With that in mind and from what you’ve said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)

It’s just a wild hunch so I’m not going to go into the why of it but it’s just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.

Ah, I found it!

It’s called "Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology”

I haven’t read it so I can’t promise anything but it might be a good place to start at the least.

So a lot of this is going to be contextual - how important the friendship is, how deep he has gone into the manosphere, how long he’s been in it etc.

I’m going to approach this from the assumption that it’s a long-game situation and that you care about the person deeply. Pretty much everything applies from this but whether you choose to maintain the friendship or whether you decide to end the friendship or you aren’t willing to invest as much into this project as it demands is your prerogative.

Basically in a long-game situation your primary concern will be to always maintain the relationship and lines of communication. If you don’t have those two fundamental factors, you will be unable to effect any change.

What this means is that you will almost certainly need to be judicious in what you choose to push back on and when you decide to do it. What this looks like, in practice, is letting things slide by if they do not serve your overall goals. I’m not saying that you have to tacitly or even implicitly support their opinions but if you are skilful about it you can make asides to voice dissent without dragging something down into a debate. Throwaway lines like “I don’t really see it that way” or “That doesn’t track with my experience” before carrying on the conversation are going to be important here.

Your friend has almost certainly taken the trauma of a breakup and turned it into manosphere bullshit. What this means is he likely feels lost, powerless, abandoned, disillusioned etc. and the manosphere narratives are assuaging these underlying feelings. You will need to approach your interactions with him in a way that does not threaten him or aggravate these feelings of powerlessness etc. because if you position yourself as a threat to the beliefs which give him a sense of security and power then you will aggravate the underlying causes for him falling to the manosphere and you will almost certainly make him dig deeper into the manosphere as a way of bolstering himself.

You will need to walk the tightrope of being a friend to him while not being an ally to his beliefs. You will have to demonstrate that you will not abandon him and that you are not going to force him into positions where he feels powerless. But at the same time, you cannot endorse his beliefs and you will need to get him to trust you enough that he expresses these opinions to you and then to trust you enough to let you explore these opinions in regards to validity, consequences, implications etc.

This is where the real work takes place. You need to be delicate and engaged while also holding a position of detachment - if you treat these discussions where you explore his beliefs from an antagonistic angle or where you are heavily invested in it emotionally, it’s going to result in arguments and shutting down and similar counterproductive outcomes.

Essentially, you want to get him to move from a totalising narrative such as “All women are b*tches” to something which has nuance, even if it isn’t a complete reversal. This might mean that when he says something like this and you have decided that it’s appropriate to challenge it in that moment, you could reflect that he doesn’t treat his mom/sister/etc. as if that statement is true. Then you want to explore this apparent contradiction and use dialogue to open up space to compare, reflect, challenge, and further explore.

If, over time, he moves from “All women are b*tches” to something like “Most women are…” or “Women can be…” then that’s progress, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Keep on chipping away at these values by exploring them, gently countering them (especially with real-world examples), and ultimately getting him to question the narratives himself.

It’s kinda hard to give a clear procedural roadmap to how you would go about challenging someone’s beliefs because it’s all so contextual but I hope this is a starting point for you. And I just want to give you a caution that if you approach interactions with your friend from the position of “I’m right and he’s wrong, he needs to learn from me so that he can see my point of view and why I’m right”, you’re never going to make progress. You have to be humble, open, curious, and most of all gentle.

Good luck with it.

There was an academic work mentioned in a recent Cosmopod episode Between the Market and the Plan. It was a very brief mention in regards to the shifting sexual mores in the USSR.

Unfortunately the title of the work wasn’t very descriptive nor catchy so I can’t recall it now. And of course the episode is 3 hours long. I’ll try to dig up the reference and get back to you about it.

Okay, for note-taking I think there are a few critical things to do:

1. Write down explanations of terms/names which you don’t implicitly understand the meaning of. Lenin is dragging Kautsky but you don’t know why or what Kautsky represented? Cool. Figure it out via Wikipedia, searching r*ddit, making a question here or on Hexbear about it etc. and write a summary of what “Kautsky” symbolises.

2. Write down questions and assumptions as they come up. “SPD will later betray the KPD” or “How does the SPD rationalise their collaboration with the Nazis? Is Thällman right about ‘social fascism’?”

3. Highlight key points and takeaways from the text. Stuff like interesting quotes, important details, the key learnings etc. All the stuff that you would put into a summary of the book if you needed to, basically.

4. You don’t have to do this in the book itself. You might want to write things down on a notepad or type it up in a word document. Depending on how in-depth you’re going, you may want to even go so far as to make it into something resembling a draft of an essay. Note that the very exercise of writing things out will reinforce your learning process so it doesn’t even need to be a permanent document tbh.

I’m also in favour of going ham on annotating books because what use is a book if it goes unused?

The purpose of a book is to be read and to be used as a tool for learning, so use it as it’s been designed.

My caveat here would be for books which are first editions or extremely rare ones but that aside, use it as you will.

If you still don’t feel comfortable with that then you can use a pencil so that your annotations are erasable or you can buy sticky inserts that are transparent overlays which you can use to write onto which doesn’t cause any permanent impact on the book itself.

As for how you take notes, it depends on what your purpose is. I’m going to chew on this question and respond to it in another reply once I’ve mustered the brainpower.

Ohh sorry I completely misinterpreted in that case. I thought you said you had pale skin in order to imply that you were a PoC but with a comparatively pale skin tone. My bad!

Damn, they treat you as subhuman just because you have dark hair and dark eyes? That’s really rough.

I’m sorry but I really can’t think of anything that would be relevant to this experience. I wish I could.

Unionise, organise, agitate, educate. Same as it has always been.

We are helpless alone but together we are strong.

You might consider learning a second language and getting tf out of the dumpsterfire that is the US preemptively though. Vietnam pays good cash for people who do english tutoring for businesspeople. Maybe you can do that “digital nomad” (*shudders*) thing too.

I’m really white so I don’t have much input on this but you might find that Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is useful for you. It’s an interesting blend of autobiographical, psychological, and political so my hope would be that it helps you to connect your personal struggles with internalised anti-blackness to the broader political and historical context that it exists within.

It’s no self-help book and it won’t be a magical cure to resolve this conflict that you’re experiencing but it might be important for you to connect your personal struggle with the broader one.

You are going to keep on encountering this as you read up on theory and history.

Try not to be too down on yourself when it happens because you shouldn’t expect yourself to be completely across the most important topics of political debate in Europe from nearly two centuries ago.

Imagine a person in a century from now reading articles from, say, The Guardian and coming across something which references “Trumpism” or “the MAGA movement” to critique it; that person almost certainly isn’t going to understand what the MAGA movement refers to but the Guardian article is going to treat it as if everyone grasps what they’re referring to because the Guardian is part of a contemporary discussion right in this very moment where it’s topical and relevant and so of course everyone grasps what it means today but this will not be the case in a hundred year’s time.

I’d recommend one of two approaches here:

Either skip over these sorts of terms because the fact that they don’t mean anything to you may be indicative of the fact that they are no longer relevant to contemporary politics (for example, you don’t hear people talking about Manichaeism or Fabianism today because it bears no relevance to today’s politics) or to put a little note next to the name with a shorthand version of what that person’s thought represents (for example, when reading Lenin lambast Bernstein you might put a little note saying “incremental reformism under bourgeois democracy to achieve socialism” so that whenever you encounter Lenin striking out against Bernsteinism then you can know what he’s really criticising when he does it.)

It will make more sense as you read more theory. Good luck with it!

I’d recommend adding nettle to your diet to help with the arthritis.

You can drink it as a tea and it’s quite nice but tbh I think you get better mileage from using dried nettle leaves as a substitute for dried parsley and/or as an addition to where you would use spinach. It’s very nutritious too.

Basically, if you’re going to make something like spinach and ricotta lasagna then you can add a heaping pile of dried nettle leaves (anywhere from a tablespoon to a handful) and you won’t even notice it.

I think you need to be a little cautious about incorporating it into your diet early on because too much can cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets but once you’ve adjusted to it then you can go hard on it.

Nettles have been a subsistence food and peasant food for centuries, if not millennia. It’s prole af.

Lol this ain’t reddit, you don’t need to couch requests for sources like that. I’m not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There’s this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

So American-centric you’d think there’s barely any other country besides the US

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There’s so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It’s idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson’s was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson’s exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the “white liberal” (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they’ll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I’ll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

People have already covered the major authors so I’m going to give a shout out to Torkil Lauesen.

He had a good interview on RevLeft Radio and an okay one on The Deprogram if you want to get a feel for what he’s like.

Like all MPs, I had no further information than the Speaker provided

I, too, do not have a smartphone or an internet connection 😔

¡Venceremos!