ʙᴏᴏᴋᴡʜʏʀᴍ [any]

getting into literature, art, or music can often be unpleasant at first. the important thing is to muster sufficient internal discipline to keep powering through it, even despite the initial lack of enjoyment.

what you’re essentially doing is re-training your brain to act the way you want, and not the way it’s used to, similar to how one may train one’s muscles in order to prevent atrophy. and, similarly to physical training, it can sadly indeed be annoying or even painful at first.

you don’t necessarily need to know how a car’s engine works in order to drive it

ah good, then we’re talking about the same thing after all.

in the country i grew up in, writing “in print” wasn’t really a thing (at least during my education, idk about now), and to be honest, it just kind of seems self-defeating to me, since the reason why cursive was invented in the first place was to facilitate quicker and more efficient writing on paper.

ah okay, i was getting worried.

i still don’t quite get why some people manage to use print to write things down, it’s so much more inefficient!

edit: in russian, for example “cursive handwriting” literally translates to “hand-written writing” (рукописное письмо), so we may mean slightly different things, idk.

wait, americans don’t learn cursive? as in handwriting?? how tf do those people write stuff down?

the thing is, it is rather hard to prove that a company is avoiding business with someone due to sanctions and not some other reason.

while SOEs may hopefully disregard the embargo more, private enterprises will probably continue following the law of the market and thus the sanctions.

no problem, glad i could help!

at its core, any state is a monopoly on violence. while capitalist states use said violence to harass and repress workers’ and other progressive movements, socialist governments should aim to utilise it against reactionary elements instead.

thus, repressive organs end up serving a generally progressive role in socialist democracies, though this should obviously not serve as an excuse for any mistakes or violations comitted by them.

none of this would be happening if they hadn’t murdered Lumumba and massacred his anti-colonial movement!

also, people don’t tend to be aware of just how prevalent torture and sexual violence are in the ukrainian army (usually perpetrated by officers or foreign volunteers towards recruits)

huh, interesting. this seems to be somewhat of a latin american regional peculiarity.

the country i’m originally from used to use the term patriotism quite differently back during the socialist era, teaching people to be proud of the socialist and internationalist homeland.

later, during the crises and wars of the 90s, you kind of had two parallel uses: on the one hand, you had the more genuine and positive use by people striving to preserve our culture and identity in the face of western and western-backed assault, but on the other hand, you had the criminal and treacherous governments, who were responsible for the catastrophe in the first place, leveraging such feelings as a smokescreen for their actions. that latter “chest-thumping and flag-waving” type of “hurrah-patriotism” is still commonly utilised by the bourgeois dictatorship whenever it needs to hide some crime or other, though it has semi-recently been increasingly superseded by atlanticist factions trying to introduce a kind of “western identity,” which is quite absurd given our history and geographical location, but sadly seems to be working scarily well.

in the western european country i currently live in, meanwhile, it mostly just gets used as a dogwhistle for neo-nazism, lmao.

yeah, you definitely seem to be taking the the correct approach! i’m sorry for having been overly pushy, it’s a bad trait of mine and one i need to work on.

it makes me very happy to hear that i could be of some help.

your plan regarding tails and tor is great; i’m very glad to see that you’re taking her security seriously. i would still perhaps look into linux as a daily driver a little. linux mint, for example, is very beginner-friendly and can easily be installed as a dual boot alongside windows. though perhaps i’m being too pushy, lol; if that’s the case, i’m very sorry.

in any case, best of luck to you two! <3

i genuinely don’t get how south-american rightists still manage to present themselves as “patriotic”, when they have such an obvious disdain for their own people and such a glaring inferiority complex towards the yanks.

engels’ “the principles of communism” is, imho, one of the best introductory texts, alongside the manifesto. marx’s “wage-labour and capital” and “value, price and profit” are very important for providing a theoretical understanding and are usually recommended to be read together. i’d also strongly recommend lenin’s “state and revolution” and especially “imperialism,” as well as luxemburg’s “reform or revolution.”

mao is also great for beginners, with an absolutely fantastic writing style, very concise and effective, as well as just enjoyable to read. i’d strongly encourage reading “on practice and on contradiction” (technically two works, but almost always merged into one), as well as the essays “oppose book worship” and “combat liberalism,” with those two just helping one become a better person, imho.

beyond theory, i’ve also heard positive things about the book “the song of ariran” by american journalist helen foster snow (pseudonym nym wales), who seems to have been generally sympathetic to the communists. it details realities of the korean independence movement and the chinese communist movement in the 1930s, based on interviews with korean communist jang ji-rak (pseudonym kim san in the book). i haven’t personally read it yet, though, so i can’t say whether it is any good truly.

in any case, please, if you haven’t done so already, encourage your partner to take necessary precautions for her safety and practise good opsec. south korea is part of extensive intelligence-sharing agreements with the us and other western nations, and you probably know the seoul government’s history of repression better than i do. so please consider trying to minimise dependency on proprietary software; i’m sure there is a lively foss/linux community in the country able to offer advice and assistance in that regard.

great post, thank you! <3

also, it’s interesting how, when hearing the term “Iberia,” i tend to first think of the region in the caucasus, while anglophones and other people of a more western background tend to primarily associate the word with the peninsula.

sometimes i fear that the current iranian leadership is suffering from putin syndrome: so many red lines that they’ve turned into a red carpet.

i’ve always found it somewhat strange how many people in the west consider all these soviet international friendship posters to have a homoerotic subtext. is friendship between people of the same gender so unthinkable there that one immediately assumes that doing things together must be romantic?