I vote Alevi. Feels like nearly everyone would get offended by an Alevi revert lol.

All The Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer is a good place to start to form the backdrop of contemporary Iran

Is it my fault for being a bad prime minister?

No, it is the transes who are to blame!

Honestly it was pretty gruelling to work my way through this book. Doesn’t help that I was extremely depressed at the time.

Zubok is neutral to positive in his assessment of Gorbachev and his reforms imo but for me it painted a picture of a very strategic dismantling of the USSR, mostly on an economic level, which seemed very cynical and calculated so that even if Gorby got ousted or someone assumed his position the reforms would have already gained enough momentum to basically ensure a capitalist restoration regardless of any later efforts to prevent it. Imo it was a counterrevolution established via policy. It makes my blood boil to think of all the immense sacrifices made just so Gorby could piss them up the wall. The book is definitely a fascinating autopsy into what happened and I definitely recommend it but at the same time it’s a very grim case study for a communist to delve into, for obvious reasons.

Anyway if you’re interested, there’s this Werner Herzog documentary Meeting Gorbachev where he interviews Gorby. Might make for an interesting way to close things out once you finish the book by getting a retrospective from him in his own words.

Nobody talks about the interregnum inherent to dual-boot

I’m stuck in it right now. There are niche utility apps I need for performing various tasks and I really don’t have the brainpower to learn and remember the terminal commands, so I am stuck being a low-T beta GUI user (the T stands for Terminal). Often I switch back to Windows and immediately I go ewwwwww but then switch back to Linux and realise that idk wtf I’m doing or how to do it, and I need to invest a good amount of time and energy learning how to use different programs just to achieve simple outcomes (that I can mostly do intuitively on Windows which leads to a sort of sunk-cost fallacy).

I really wish there was a hour or two YouTube tutorial that just ran through the Linux replacements for Windows features in a 1:1 sorta way. For example I was having trouble with certain apps’ stability and not having a native shortcut for the Linux task manager equivalent, or even knowing what it was called, was infinitely frustrating. I get that Linux is its own set of OSes and that it shouldn’t be expected to be a 1:1 replacement that mirrors Windows in every way but also it takes a while and it requires a bit of effort just to figure out basic things that are sorta essential which you don’t realise you need until you don’t have access to them.

I mean who’s gonna proactively research the task manager equivalent in Linux and create a custom keyboard shortcut for it just in case an app is fullscreen and it bugs out and stops responding but doesn’t allow you to switch away from it? Not a new user or a newly dual-booting person.

Personally I’ll be fine; I know enough and I have the determination to muddle my way through but there has been a couple of points where I’m like “Yep, this is exactly where people drop out and revert back to Windows.”

All of this is tangential to your post but since we’re airing grievances about transitioning to Linux I just wanted to vent my own frustrations.

It’s gonna be down to the wire imo.

Kamala has lost steam and there’s such desperation from the voteshamers that I think most of her supporters have at least some degree of latent awareness that she isn’t capable of drawing in support outside of her base, either to the right of her or to the left.

Donald is low energy but almost all of his base is willing to hold their nose and vote for him, which drives the Blue MAGA crowd wild with envy. I really don’t look at that end of US politics much at all because it’s gross and I don’t have the stomach for it, plus it achieves nothing whereas there’s a chance I might be able to peel off the occasional progressive whereas conservatives are low yield per input so my take is that it’s a waste of time focusing on them. (Don’t get me wrong I’ll agitate anyone opportunistically, even a diehard Trump supporter, but I’m really not focusing my energy on honing my rhetoric and hooking in to their primary concerns because there are much easier targets out there.)

I think in it being such a close race it’s probably going to come down to one of those key states falling to one side or the other and who really knows which way the chips are going to fall in that situation?

If Trump wins I think he’ll lose the popular vote though.

If this happens, I’m going to blame the Dems for how they had the opportunity to abolish the electoral college, to make the presidential election a popular vote, and establishing ranked-choice voting to instead push through military aid and financial relief to support the genocide in Gaza as their top priority which means Joe Biden chose this and now we have to respect that choice and live with the consequences of it because Biden and Harris didn’t want to listen to the voter base.

When they blame us for the loss, remember to ask them this: if we are such a powerful, important voting bloc then why did Kamala choose to speak over us rather than recognising that the most important factor in politics is to make crucial compromises in order to achieve progress and to prevent Trump from seizing power?

Use it to defend West Asians from the inevitable hate that will be directed at them for “making” Kamala lose as well, please.

It’s Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada.

Here’s a documentary about the Canadian Residential School system featuring interviews with people who suffered at the hands of this egregious injustice against First Nations peoples.
Note that this documentary came out before the largest discoveries of unmarked graves at residential schools was made.

Here’s a documentary about the Highway of Tears.
Given the history of so-called Starlight Tours, and especially the fact that no pig has ever been charged for causing deaths by freezing, I find it harder to believe that zero cross-burners are implicated in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women phenomenon than to think that they are complicit in it. The abject lack of investigations done into MMIW certainly points in that same direction too.

This is the Canada that condescends to the world about how it’s imperative to uphold human rights. No justice, no peace.

Of all the people aside from uncle Ted, I would have assumed that Tolkien the arch philologist would have gotten the eat your cake/have it too phrasing the right way round. Apparently not.

Norm announces his same-sex relationship with Mike Lindell quietly on Twitter by asking fans to support his partner’s ailing business

Who tf ornithologists naming these birds!?

I’d say that there’s the assumption that she went to the vet and said “I tried to gas my dogs last night and now they aren’t walking around” or “I accidentally left the gas on and poisoned my dogs” when she might have just said she found her dogs this way, which is much more likely.

With urgent medical treatment like this vets would have a protocol. Dogs are ridiculous for eating things that cause self-termination and it happens all the time. If you have two dogs presenting with an inability to walk then immediately the vet is going to ask “Wtf did they eat??”.

When it comes to medical interventions like this in an urgent setting, I’d hazard a guess that charcoal is routinely administered. If there’s any toxin in their digestive tract then it’s the best chance of adsorbing it. Activated charcoal will adsorb orally administered medications too but you can hook a dog up to an IV so they can mainline any meds and even if there’s a remote chance they ate something bad, charcoal is very cheap and very safe to administer especially as something that only occurs rarely.

If a vet told me that as a matter of routine whenever a dog presents with any kind of poisoning symptoms, they administer charcoal I’d absolutely believe it. Same goes for doctors in an emergency setting working with young kids and people with intellectual disability.

It drives the tankies batshit crazy when we point out the death toll caused by Marxism and Maoism.

>mrw

Those are the Anarchist-In-Name-Only types.

“Two state solution? How about no state solution. Both sides are bad and neither get my support 😏”

They’d be out here denouncing figures like Durruti and Malatesta as tankies for what they advocated for and what they did, if they were alive today.

This is one of my favourite Nina Simone moments

Here’s a TankieTube link to a documentary about the Bhopal industrial disaster.

Lots of anti-dandruff shampoos can be used for jock itch. You want something that has selenium sulfide or zinc pyrithione in it. The higher concentration the better (as long as you’re buying it off the shelf in a grocery store anyway).

Apply the shampoo to the affected area. Leave it to sit for the time stated on the bottle or longer because that really is not going to do you any harm. If you really want to knock it on its head apply the shampoo before you shower so it doesn’t get diluted by the water and let it sit on your skin for a few minutes and then jump in the shower.

Rinse off. Dry your skin thoroughly, paying close attention to the affected skin areas. I’d recommend using a hairdryer or a fan to dry your skin in these areas completely before you get dressed. Repeat this daily until the itching and skin discolouration is gone then continue with the treatment for at least a couple of days longer.

Keep the shampoo bottle in your shower and if you notice any itching starting up again, apply another round of the shampoo as a maintenance thing and you should be good.

If this doesn’t work then see a doctor/speak to a pharmacist and bring out the heavier stuff. But you might be surprised at how effective antidandruff shampoo can be and you can get a huge amount of treatment for only a couple of dollars. Probably less if you can find antidandruff shampoo in the dollar store where you are.

I’ve worked in the NGO sector. Obviously it will vary between countries but by and large the experience of interviews with NGOs leaves you scratching your head wondering if they’re a serious operation.

Thing is though, it’s the really slick NGOs that give a strong impression of being serious that are the ones to avoid, at least most of the time. Sure, the poor quality interviewer NGOs come with plenty of their own flaws but if the NGO is slick and corporate then most often they are the worst of the for-profit world with being ruthless and cutthroat while also paying like a non-profit and expecting workers to do their jobs (with plenty of unpaid overtime) because of their passion or dedication to a social cause.

The other NGO is the militant sort. Those ones are rare and they’ll mean business in a completely different way to a corporatised NGOs. Hard to find, hard to get into but if you’re good at what you do and you don’t fuck around then they can be really good places to work. Or they can be toxic as fuck but because everyone’s so single-pointedly focused on achieving outcomes, nobody rocks the boat and the culture of the NGO becomes worse each year.

It’s a weird corner of employment tbh.

I keep quiet about which one because I’m a bit security conscious and I don’t want to put out more info about myself than I already do.

The government of the country I’m in. Some shithole western country. But it’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie here so it’s a rich man’s government not my government.