The various vape pens can be used without nicotine, but not sure how bad that still is for you. So probably not the best advice.

Went to the May Day march. There were a lot more commies and leftists that I had anticipated.

Met a 89 year old Red grandpa who had rolled in with his rollator to sing the Internationale and chatted with him for a while. He had such sparkly all seen eyes and such worry for the times we are in. We sang the songs together, it was very nice.

It's labour day (Mayday/vappu) here tomorrow. Made me so sad to find out that there are officially no commies whatsoever present for the march this time, but the sucdems and natoleft will be giving the union sanctioned speeches.

The fash is also planning their own march and there is an anti-fascist counter march planned by a group who calls themselves "The Red flag".

Also got the latest "newspaper" from the only tiny group of commies that calls themselves ML and it featured a large article about how China is entirely revisionist and doing socialism the wrong way.

But still, happy Mayday!

I think that all basic everyday skills like baking, cooking, knitting, repairing stuff, camping, some diy builds in woodwork and such are good and things we can use in solidarity with others as well although they might seem mundane. But getting a bag of potatoes to go a long way for a lot of people is definitely a useful skill, one I learned from my prole grandma. Also fermentation and preserving food.

Food foraging if allowed/able to do that. Berry and mushroom picking. Fishing if eating fish. Learning your plants: edible wild plants, berries and shrooms even if not able to go get them.

A basic skill in orienteering which we thankfully learn in school. If already familiar with it, keeping it up by hiking or some sort of nature shenanigans.

Rowing and skiing, these are related to my location, but reassure me that I could disappear in the woods winter or summer and move relatively swiftly.

Gardening or learning to grow your own food or a part of it, maybe urban shroom gardening or micro greens if stuck in an apartment building.

Some self-defence sports also, they helped me reassure myself that I can fend for myself if needed.

We have been making a lot of stuff from used pallets for our tiny backyard. We make our own furniture or repair used stuff as well and bake all our own bread which I also gift to others.

Going into a makerspace to do crafty stuff can also be a way to find likeminded folks or people who could use hints in the right direction.

I used to target practice as a kid with an air rifle, but I want to go take an archery class next. A hunting bow might be a good thing to own, for food and other things.

My relative was an exhange student in the US in the 70s and has told me that one of the problems she ran into with the host family was the way she would just go for walks and jogs around the area by herself. This was somehow super dangerous and unheard of, she said the area was just a basic suburb.

It's an entirely different outlook on life.

Saw a Western lib write out a wall of text about their heroic tale of "surviving a crisis" as them as tourists had faced the incredible hardship of the power going out in Spain yesterday.

They even had kids with them, it was such crisis. But they made it and even found wifi to use. Thank goodness.

Like, oh no! Oh my! This is the level of hardship that the westoid brain breaks under. It's pathetic. I don't know where these people live, but at least I still grew up in a place where the power went out all the time, the pipes froze over in winter so we had no water and yet it was fine.

I sometimes wish types like these would be faced with an actual crisis, like the people in Gaza who can't even sleep in a tent safely.

Hanging with the corgi outside on an 80 degree day and there were flower petals blowing in the wind on our walk.

Also enjoying spring. Currently sitting by an open window and it's raining outside and pretty warm. Incredible blackbird song everywhere and almost dark. It's all good.

It's so complex that I find it hard to articulate as English isn't my first language.

I really aporeciate the discussion, I've been meaning to discuss this here in some form after I got it into my head that I do want to pursue a doctoral thesis in social work for the sole purpose of laying bare the contradictions within it and critically examine the history of this work. It's currently framed from a very bourgeois history-style that omits the white terror & the way social work was also a tool for fascism etc. The work with the poors is framed as charity and aid, the control aspect never gets analyzed (although it is mentioned).

Might not work a day for the rest of my life after I do this, but I will do it anyway.

This wallet gendering is just a plot by the clothing industry so they don't have to put pockets in womens clothes.

I would think it's a liability thing for sure. If you have an spo2 meter you could also check how you do with it? No permanent harm feels likely as we should adapt to respiratory resistance just fine.

Assuming you are wearing a n95 type mask of dome kind, maybe this study could give you some peace of mind? It states that there are changes in prolonged use, but those are likely to resolve with adaptation and none are outside the normal range.

Anecdotally I've personally done weightlifting in a FFP2 mask, it was uncomfortable at first, but I got used to it.

Edit. Here is a systemic review looking spesifically at exercise. I would think that this can be compared to harder labor.

I will preface this by saying that I am myself a previously poor person who decided to pursue a degree in social work as my own conditions improved. The class question in this work is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. It is full of contradictions and comes down to the very question of what is social work and waged work and would such a profession exist if society was organized in a different way. The questions of community, mutual aid, state responsibility and so much more gets tied to it as well.

The basic premise and understanding for me is that social work (as it now is in the West) is still historically and today a profession that manages the contradictions of capitalism and thereby sustains capitalism. We can look at the historical poor laws and the management of surplus populations and how this originally charity based work is tied to the development of capitalism. I recommend reading Health Communism that touches on stuff like this a lot. Social workers are tied to state power and in a western state the laws largely dictate the wiggle room an individual worker has. The stronger the neoliberal service sector and managerialism, the less we can actually materially improve the lives of clients. And at the end of the day this improvement is meant to prevent revolution and uphold the welfare state (bourgeois democracy). I therefore think that doing social work for the proletariat requires us to be class traitors.

I don't currently think that there are ways around this and I think this is important to understand if being a class traitor is the goal. I have done this work now for about 3 years and been a client of the same profession previously in my life. In my country social work is a state mandated profession where my work is also supervised by laws. Here nobody can work in social work or the service sector without some type of degree and this is something that our current right wing government is trying to dismantle atm. This comes down to social work being a service sector profession with a decent wage currently that is dominated by women. As a worker my interest is then tied with upholding the licensing and professionalization of social work.

However there is a some wiggle room there if one is ready to put in the work and use it, but this only affects individual lives. The focus of the profession is on individuals and american style case work is still prevalent in social work (tends to ignore the structural). The profession and the science of social work has historically very much ignored Marxism and the theories most popular today come from structuralism and post-structuralism. I have just been reading about theories for social work and the so called radical social work that was stronger prior to neoliberalism was never marxist, but there were still strong currents of it there and some of the course books in the US were written by these radical social work advocates like Jacob Fisher, Bertha Capen Reynolds or Mary van Kleeck. So there is struggle and contradictions there that can be worked with.

I have been reading about this a lot and also been trying to understand how social work is done in AES countries. In China the profession was first non-existent and the push to bring it into the country has not in any means been without conflict. There seems to be a lot of Western NGO involvement and on the whole social work can also be seen as a profession globally that has upheld and upholds so called Western values & capitalism and is itself an arm of colonialism. The papers you can find in the West about this require reading between the lines and understanding the interests of western academia when framing this. One better example from Peking university here. from the history of the profession in China.

Recommended reading that I have read for example:

Marxist social work: an international and historical perspective

Marxist Approaches to Social Work

A course book we just had to read Social work and social theory : making connections (this one especially is very "Western leftist" (they all are), ignores AES states and repeats the point of view of western academia on marxism, but tries to end up into a position of some sort or marxism.

The profession is also an example of a field dominated by women that was one of the entry points of women to paid labor via the charity aspect. The women however were typically petty bourgeois/upper class and today the profession is gate-kept behind academic degrees on the level on national law. I am personally interested in writing my dissertation on the lack of class consciousness in social work in my own country and what says a lot about it, is the fact that there are none such academic work in the entire field even though it uses phrases like praxis, solidarity and equality in almost all of the material produced.

From my everyday work I would also point out how the work itself does radicalize almost all who do it to some degree. Social work itself is a sort of contradiction to me that puts privileged peoples in positions where they can no longer ignore the issues of our current system and if they do, they usually can't do the actual work or help anyone. These are the people who go work for the private sector in all likelihood where moral ends and it becomes wholly about profit.

The union of social workers is also tied to the bourgeoisie and is a so called academic union that has never truly sided with the working class struggle. This divide is between the academic unions and working class unions in my country and has aided the divide within the working class itself and partially upheld the manufacturing of the so called middle class.

The professional mandate itself advocates us to side with the clients. If you do that with an understanding of the system and how it keeps people down, you need to basically advocate for revolution and call it like it is. You can do this within the wiggle room you are given only to a degree or you will lose your job and it rests entirely on the individual. It's all very contradictory.

My to go-smoothie machine where you make the smoothie straight into the mug. It has completely solved my audhd tendency to not eat anything at all in the mornings/all day and makes it easy for me to get my daily fiber, berries and fruit. I use oat milk & vegan protein powder in it and it has also heavily lowered the animal product amount I use, which I love. It makes very little dishes too and seems to help my covid destroyed GI trackt as well.

And then there is my bluetooth sleep mask that has solved my lifelong also audhd related sleep issues. It used to take me forever to sleep because my mind will start planning stuff or daydreaming when the lights go out and it's quiet. So as I remembered how much it helped me sleep as a kid when my dad read stories to me I decided to try that.

I started listening to the Discworld books around 2019 and been doing that ever since, every single night. If and when I wake up in the night I just turn it back on and it makes falling back to sleep so much easier. I used to have such stress over this that it ruined my work and I was always tired before ordering this little mask from China.

I don't really understand the use of it that people are describing here, but the way I for example use a bidet would not do that. There is no aiming, I use it like a hand shower because that is what it essentially is.

I use it from the front to the back always and wash with soap as well with my other hand. First water, soap, then a good rinse. Then dry everything up well. I don't understand how just shooting water up my butt crack would really wash anything well.

Ffs, went to see what is up in the local (nato) leftist party website and these people are literally recommending Anne Applebaum books to "fellow leftists".

This is so pathetic from a place where Stalin and Lenin met for the first time. Where the streets ran red from the blood of communists that were slaughtered by the white terror and gave us all that we now have.

To think that these "leftists" have just comfortably chosen to ignore all this and just go slava ukraine all day long is doing my head in.

All the toilets where I am from have a bidet and we do wash our bits with them. At least all who I have done bidet discourse with do.

Even public toilets have them and it would be incredible miserable to exist in the world with periods if they didn't.

But I still need TP as a person without a personal hose for peeing. It's also nice to dry things up with after the washing and then there's the period stuff. This post seems to ignore that not everyone has similar plumbing.

For what it's worth I personally take part in this because I need to understand better where all this is coming from and how people think and it's also incredibly disappointing for exactly the reasons the OP pointed out. Yet these "tankies bad" posts just keep on coming and are symptomatic of the state of the left in the West.

I approach online discussion thinking that there could always be people reading it who could benefit from seeing the counterarguments. I know I did, I used to have far more brainworms (no doubt I still do). But without seeing the arguments I don't think I would have evolved past them, at least not as quickly. Our basic westoid countries are very hegemonic on the bourge talking points.

It doesn't mean I don't touch grass or try to aid class consciousness in my every day, but I am not going to post about those on an online forum.

I am still undiagnosed and not in the US, but this sort of thing and employment evaluations are still the big reasons I haven't pursued it.

We have the tech broyi big data medical records where I live, if I had the diagnosis, it would be so easy to pick me up from the records. The surveillance that people have just willingly signed up for cover all medical records nbd diagnoses on a national level. They are just ready to be exploited for when this country gets to where the US is now.

I am so worried for our US comrades tbh.

It really does.

Memory time: I remember a moment, well over a decade ago now, when I was with my grandma who was well over 80 at the time (rip) and she started talking about how fleeting life really is and how she feels no different on the inside from how she felt as a 15 year old. And that she isn't at all ready to die or found some sort of peace with how fast life went by. The body just ages from around you, but the kid that would like to run and jump is still right there wondering wtf happened.

This moment really stuck with me and feels more true each day that passes. Time also goes by faster each year. It's kind of terrifying.