RiotDoll [she/her, she/her]

don’t feel bad for sharing this stuff. This is interesting to me.

if you’re hoping it’s a bullet that fixes the problem, eh, not for me, but I hope somebody gets something a bit more directly meaningful out of it - divesting from the teat of big tech in every way is a good thing

It’s not a Mint or cinnamon problem, it’s a me problem. I literally don’t want to learn this stuff right now. I sit down and try and i just have to sit with a decade+ of growing resentment for the stranglehold this tech has on my life. I don’t want to give it more of my grey matter. I just don’t.

I would literally rather move on.

If you can’t fathom it, I am not trying to deride mint nor cinnamon - and maybe other desktop enviros are more suited to my tastes? but the fact is i don’t care anymore. i dont want to cram my brain full of shit i resent, and microsoft insisting i move to a system with a worse UI, worse performance, and a nightmare of panopticon slopfest bullshit, it just makes it easier to go, “fuck this shit entirely” tbqh.

going all in on a linux environment to me feels like retreating to keep fighting on a battlefield whose war is practically over, and not in the favor of the side i’m fighting for. It’s a retreat knowing encroachment won’t stop and won’t ever let me get away in truth.

I want to re-conceptualize my relationship to this technology; i see growing resentment @ tech on the left and while I don’t think some kind of “destroy it all burn it all down” approach is prudent, I think about the virtues of going offline, and going to older tech while we still have it; you know, stuff that can compute and assist with certain tasks without being part of a giant panopticon network, deployed for things that exclude leisure and entertainment? That’s how I’m thinking of this tbh

I have Mint installed, and it’s fine. It’s fucking FINE. but i’ll be honest, i’ve spent more or less my entire 3+ decades of life using windows machines and as close as mint+cinnamon gets to a win-10 vibe, it ain’t windows. The nuances of linux piss me off, and computers have gone from a loving fascination into a very rocky hot/cold relationship where I mostly hate but feel bound to the technology for all kinds of intangible socio-cultural reasons.

I fully fucking despise windows 11. I just kinda hate having to learn everything and get comfy with Mint. So if those freaks at Microsoft wanna try to force the issue, that might be what I need to drastically improve my life and divorce myself from computer tech.

forgive me for jumping in, but as somebody with weirder sexual needs it’s absolutely a nightmare. My one major relationship with a cis-femme was a fucking micro-sexual revolution for her.

i was the first partner to give a shit about her needs, i was the first one to talk openly and earnestly about my and her needs and sex generally

literally every cis woman i get close to, who I didn’t meet in a kinky (or pagan lol) circle basically ends up radicalized by accident just because i don’t fucking mess around with that stuff and create communication channels for those things when they’re relevant.

and it’s really depressing. Cis men can be even worse. Even when I find one that like, understands trans women enough to not be a freak, there is a whole world inside them tightly wound up to prevent it from being seen by the outside world, and it’s mostly made up of repressed sexual needs and the toxic pathologies that emerge from binding them.

don’t entangle yourselves with these people further

this is some monkeys paw shit

lmao i actually have anxiety about any of you successfully doing this

because people are reading and watching, and the success of a project like that will be funny for about 10 minutes, until the consequences of said success begin to immediately manifest lol

i think i get fucked up by the intersection of “identity politics” and marxism myself, because I genuinely have seen identity used as a cudgel to stop things from happening, as somebody insisted the communists they were surrounded with n eeded to focus on this thing that’s not really actually marxist and commit resources to that instead

and in the end it’s somebody using identity to build clout and power.

it’s a pretty human thing to want to put your ego and all of its constituent parts at the center of a struggle. it’s pretty human to feel alienated and angry when your issues are playing second fiddle with people who ostensibly support you

but also the reaction against “idpol” was a reaction to wrecking behaviors that hide behind it, imo, and nobody really has managed to propagate a framework for unpacking all of that in a way that doesn’t leave somebody pissed off.

If you’re more invested in doing things with the broadest possible impact, having people obviously using issues of identity to throw down and get in the way can suck ass.

but as soon as there was a reaction against that weaponization of idpol, there was a weaponization of the reaction against weaponization and at this point in 2026 i feel gross even using some of these words in a context like this

I was about to be like “exactly” but on reflection, not quite? but this is good.

It’s spot on to have this sort of process. that’s good. I have a pretty intense process to manage mine and i’m still awful at it, but i know the virtue of it.

To me, the ego is a shield. that people mistake for themselves, and they never clean it off or remove or maintain it. but some personality types want to be in charge. they want to do things. they may have been told that they’re supposed to do this for x y z reasons. it frankly doesn’t matter.

All I know is that I struggle with my own, and while I think you need a lil’ somethin’ somethin’ to lead people, the ego needs to be healed, or at least managed. The questions you give as an example are good - Just don’t pre-game yourself into compliance or meekness for its own sake. If you do that kind of work, and you know what you’d do to help organize and grow the org in that moment, it’s worth fighting over.

I think I just… i know the type of thing that makes me not want to turn up for things, and it’s all ego-tyrant, clout-demon nonsense, and again my personal life is a struggle session wherein i must overcome the monster (ego) within right now, so you know… it’s on the mind. It’s everywhere though. Knowing it’s an ego disease provides remedies I guess?

I hope i’m making sense. god. if this is nonsense im sorry. i’m trying to say a thing and i’m terrified i didn’t succeed lol

The ego is the enemy of progress.

There are people for whom their benevolence towards their fellow humans is contingent on them being at the center of things, or them being placated. It’s grody, but pretty normal. Most people aren’t aware of what they’re doing. The ones who are, and still do this crap, are enemies. I hope that goes without saying.

But the honest truth is that the egoic self is usually a toxic hellpit, and a person with a modicum of power and no self awareness of the workings of their own ego can have the best intentions in the world, but will be pulled along by the need to be right, to be in charge, to be acknowledged as exceptional, or somehow set apart - the maintenance of the perception those things are happening becomes more important than the ostensible reason they’ve got voice and power in a given org.

The fix is education, and I hate to say it but the kind of education necessary will probably cause socialist nostrils to flare, just because it would involve meditation and “spiritual” work that has empirically observed effects on the mind - No woo woo shit, but the inability to manage the ego is probably the biggest thing that holds orgs back.

Sorry. I’m dealing with my own right now, so the problem is perceived as brighter/louder in the external world than it usually is for me.

Behind every asshole that wasn’t an intentional wrecker, whose bullshit ended up stymieing or killed a project/org, is almost certainly an unhealed ego

If you have ego tyrants infesting an org, sometimes it’s best to just bypass them or go elsewhere. You’re not gonna be able to therapy them into healing, you just need to take their power, and if you can set your ego aside and tap the right shoulders, you can probably get on with Doing Stuff as if the tyrant isn’t there

Scruggs Piston

Jimson Holler

Clivestus Cornwall

change will always come, and things like the Bolshevik rise to power are exceedingly rare, but they do happen.

I struggle to stay optimistic that I will get outcomes I like. I often feel like leftists in America are losing the thread. This is possibly a “me” problem, but when I listen to people who are leftist and also politically active where I am, I hear a lot of shit that I really think has no business coming out of the mouth of anybody fighting for liberation or a more equitable world.

I struggle a lot with that stuff. I worry it’s just black-pilled nonsense. Like the left has had a boot on its head for a long, long, long time in the US, and the feeling of “fuck it, let’s just go for broke” and start pushing things the average person would either laugh at or recoil in horror at.

But I keep my optimism because I get to see people who are ride or die for other human beings, who want revolution, who act with their hearts full of compassion and love, and in that is my hope.

Those folks are my canary. If everyone is shitty and doomer brained all the time, i’m out of there. If we are doing things that are compromised by irrational or hateful motivations, i’m out of there.

But so often it’s just some of the kindest people you’ll ever meet, getting vicious on behalf of the marginalized, and yeah… i just remember that’s where my heart is.

deleted by creator

i’m really used to their conflation, sorry

can you justify your position here?

I tend to follow parapolitics/“conspiracy” stuff - i am seeing a lot of people who were being actively gaslit about it, completely validated.

not all conspiracy is “anunaki blood rituals to disguise the flat earth”.

Sometimes it’s having a mountain of evidence some group did something that never quite coalesces into a sure thing.

You spend some time looking at that material but maintaining skepticism, you notice two patterns - fantasy conspiracies - these are often emotionally driven affairs, with strong narrative throughlines, and obvious conclusions you can draw. There are more tells, but this is something like Pizzagate, for example.

A pizzagate type narrative would be a shitcoat. You take a true thing - there is a massive pedophile conspiracy involving powerful people. Then you make it ridiculous.

This sucks all the air out of the room. It kinda is the exact thing that whips you up into being mad about conspiracies.

But then there’s like, “The CIA has clearly done something, they have oblique documented references, there are witnesses in the right time and place, there is some amount of material evidence…” - there’s usually no story. No narrative. Nothing juicy - just this powerfully nasty outcome that’s implied but not quite confirmed.

And I know a lot of people who follow the latter kind of conspiracy who are extremely validated right now.

There’s really nothing off hand I can offer that answers your specific question, unfortunately. I can look through some stuff and see where I got my ideas, but that’ll take more time than I have tonight.

for books on thinking about religion and athropology more generally, i have to recommend Existential Anthropology by Michael Jackson (no relation hee hee) - despite not being specifically about religion, i feel it… really is helpful in creating a useful mindset for approaching religion & human society-centric topics in an academic and scholarly manner - tbqh it gets frustrating that this kind of education isn’t a more important part of marxist studies, because it would radically alter the left’s ability to engage with people for whom religion is often the dividing line between us and them.

i can possibly assemble a few others. I’ll see what I can do - DM me so i don’t forget about this and i’ll throw some stuff your way when i have time.

In the mean time, i can at least point you to educational (non polemical/apologetic and backed up with real data) videos.

I highly recommend Religion For Breakfast and Let’s Talk Religion. The former has a doctorate and is a pretty serious scholar. His videos often invite the view to comport themselves to a more academic understanding of the material before explaining things.

I would be careful to rely overly on materials that are speculative or are kinda… normie facing? the stuff that’s made for sale as something you might readily find at barnes & noble or half-price books - as that stuff will not be trying to teach you how to think about and approach religious topics in a neutral, truth-seeking manner.

This is a Religion For Breakfast video about the parallels between modern fandoms & similar phenomena, and classical religion, and iirc to make sure the distinctions are understood he tries to read the viewer in to a more helpful mindset to think about these things in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU8w4KxoyRk

Let’s Talk Religion is also ace stuff, but is more Islam-focused, and is, imo, really quite valuable in a very similar way.

I do read, but this stuff is a lot better to put in my head than entertainment slop, so i tend to favor it when i’m trying to distract myself. Lets me learn while being lazy.

They post their sources, back up their claims and analysis, and are generally a good starting point for deconstructing religious matters.

you have a few forces, plus or minus stuff you require non-materialistic understanding to take seriously, with religion.

We should identify what Christianity is, actually.

**Christianity is - **A movement started by the word and actions of a Galilean Jewish man probably named something like Yeshua.

Yeshua is very likely a real historical person, there’s enough documentation to support the idea that he was at the center of some kind of religious/political movement. There are a lot of different speculations on the nature of the Historical “Jesus” - but one I tend to favor is that he was possibly a genuine rebel against Roman occupation and the puppet dynasty ostensibly ruling over Judea at the time. He was killed, his movement dies, his followers are martyred or driven into hiding. At this point the memory of who he was starts becoming fuzzy, and the theology of Christianity starts diverging massively from whatever that Yeshua-driven message was, though a lot of it may actually survive. ** Christianity is a religious and political institution** - It was always intended to be, if you follow the narrative above, and always was in a certain sense. But when Constantine legitimizes it as a state backed religion, it becomes a tool of statecraft and the management of people. Which means that the priorities shift, especially so divorced from origin, from the justification and establishment of a socio-religious polity, to being direct machinery of the state (of the people who killed him no less). Even through the reformation and all the way to the present moment, its prime role has been political and behavioral justification. ** Christianity is the art of reading, interpreting, and applying the message of a handful of books and letters**, and reinterpreting materials made outside of it as an institution and movement.

There is more, but im moving on - what Christianity is, and therefore what Christians are, exist at the confluence of these factors. Because everything from the nature of how it started, to who/what is legitimate, to what it means to be Christian, to how to interpret its holy books and materials, are all points of contention - what a Christian is is actually fairly fluid.

Because of this, it’s not actually helpful to frame this sort of nonsense as indicative of Christians being Christians, or there being some essential nature to a Christian we can dissect from the events in the OP.

In the united states, though, is a kind of protestant Christianity that:

a) has zero interest in unpacking “The Bible” or any other Christian materials. For anyone that isn’t whatever passes for clergy in a given congregation, it’s mostly social, and where thought is concerned, the relationship is receptive. This isn’t a place of learning how to think about things. It’s not a place you learn about the social impact of your behavior, except that Evangelism is Good, and Public, Narcissistic Acts of Prayer Show Piety. Understanding isn’t a priority.

b) finds historical context and philosophical deconstruction of the source materials to be almost like, anathema, to the belief itself. Because this version of Christianity is so, utterly detached and unlike what it claims to be, most folks are not going to be able to understand the words in the book except by their own idiom and “common sense” - that the gospel of John is literally dripping in neoplatonic thought, and that the Apostle Paul is clearly like, an actual fucking mystic talking about esoteric and occult matters is not only lost on this group, it’s heresy. It’s satanic influence. It’s so unlike what it says it is, there’s no reconciling what’s actually in those books with anything they prioritize.

c) is very specifically keyed to the interests of a very specific kind of powerful person. It has to fit into this idea of itself that serves the state, which is about instilling low information, emotionally driven action, and validating these experience through pretty basic psychological manipulations. I got to learn how the sausage is made for Charismatic and Pentecostal groups because I was being courted to join my friends in a school meant to create future pastors and church leaders. It nearly left me an atheist. It’s all about guiding minds, terminating thought, and getting people who have nothing to cough it up so Pastor Fuckboy can buy a ferrari and has the clout to run for local, state, or national office. Or to be in a position to play kingmaker for such positions of power.

d) expects public displays and affirmation of belief, and is increasingly in a siege mindset that means each group prayer at your job is actually a fucking struggle session and loyalty test. To fail to participate sufficiently is to out yourself, and find yourself out of a job.

is this actually Christianity? As a huge fucking religion nerd - No. Absolutely not. Not really. Not in the sense that it has much of anything in common with whatever traces of the Jesus Movement as it really existed survives for us to compare to - in that way it’s damn near a complete inversion of the tenets.

So to answer you finally, “Christians” aren’t necessarily full of themselves, but in a lot of places these days, you will find people professing a christian faith that gleefully feeds narcissism such that “winning the football game” or “making a lot of money” are signs of favor and divine glory, is morally, inexplicably more akin to Norse larping than traditionally Christian views and behaviors, that is increasingly less interested as an entity in being anything more than what it’s supposed to be - a mass manipulation tool.

Christians are like this because they’re either mindfucked real deep. just a gaping hungry butthole in their brains desperate for a rod or to spew shit everywhere; or they’re climbing. they’re using this monstrosity to increase their own corporeal power.

I personally hate it.

You get really bright people swept up into this kind of, well, like world that privileges them and insulates them, and most minds are going to become immersed in that and assume that the institution is good and beyond reproach. They’re inside it and see no problem, so external detractors must clearly be wrong. They don’t know “how it really is”, after all.

You can honestly cultivate a system that blinds people to certain kinds of realities outside of their own experience, and the top end of nearly any org that exists under capitalism is going to deal with this a bit or a lot, depending on how much they believe in the system.

I don’t think it’s about good or bad or ignorant and enlightened. I think perfectly good people end up being servants to bad things, and end up taking in bad views that poisons their soul.

It’s hard to not give into a sense that “this is entirely by design” - and I think especially with people who have a high level of abstract intelligence and low social intelligence kind of need exposure to unpleasant things to understand their own position in things. Without it you have a society that will elevate, isolate, and surround you with people who think very similarly to you - you will have nothing but monetary, social, and experiential affirmation of increasingly ghoulish views.

It’s like Amigara Fault - you can’t go down these paths and stay what you entered the hole as. It will twist you up, and again, i think it’s by design.

To me it’s like, obvious that the federal system largely runs on bribes and buy-in. Given our international proclivities, it feels wildly hypocritical to be mad that other countries try to establish their own buy-in with our system.

Like, democrats will throw trans people under the bus for not donating enough and supporting leftists over them. They’re petty, punitive, and look at everything from a numbers pov - be that attention, sympathy/alignment, and most especially, straight up money.

That we often just pick a nation at random to make an Official Enemy every few years makes it entirely sensible that the international situation is one of people trying to protect themselves from that inevitability both domestically and in Washington DC

It’s hard to have a problem with it in that manner. It’s hard to care, because there’s no way Russian influence actually matters a whole lot beyond creating opportunities for their own buy-in to national concerns.

I phrased it that way because I get genuine hermit/monkish urges that just aren’t strong enough to sustain that commitment, but it often came from a yearning to break away from useless and time wasting habits.

I am more spiritually inclined than most of Hexbear is going to be, so I engage in these practices for more than material reasons, but I often find that the strongest anchors for why i’m doing something like mindfulness is material - I want to overcome the domination of external stimuli over my own will.

Friend, this is going to be hard work, and you should not expect overnight success (if you find that, I will be so happy for you, just don’t give up if this takes a while).

I’m not a buddhist, but the best manual on mindfulness I’ve ever read was The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s a complilation of letters and advice he gave when he was younger, and it’s short, concise, and will get you started, and I must recommend you read it (and practice it while you read it!) if you want to start taking control of your inner and outer processes.

there is no greater freedom than realizing you can step off all these treadmills eating into your psyche whenever you want, and that your discomfort towards doing so is temporary and largely illusory.

The fix stays the same. The part of your brain that says you need to be plugged into that slop is a liar. ignore the liar. you know inside what you need to do, or you wouldn’t be here asking this stuff.

Nobody teaches you to take the reins; capital wants people that are good at being steered, not good at driving. You have to do it yourself. Treat those impulses like the cop in your brain trying to keep you asleep, because that’s what it is.

This is my experience, and I need to preface it with this: I don’t manage this perfectly, i just know the strategy works when i execute it:

First off, you need to have some awareness of why you form routines and habits. If you’re sober, you get dopamine largely from external activities, and engaging activities. Things that stimulate, beckon you to give input - you mention gaming and painting (same tbh) - Why do you think you’re so connected to gaming? It’s stimulating. It needs constant input, engagement, it’s flashy, it’s engaging almost all of your senses and your thought capacity in a totalizing manner - this is hijacking your reward pathways. It may not be as ruinous as, say, recreational drugs can be, but this is still addictive; even if not, it’s certainly habit forming.

You mentally need the tools to deny yourself. Not to become a monk or ascetic, but things like mindfulness and meditation can help because they train you to pull back from external stimuli and engage them differently. If you do this, once you start detaching, I’m telling you, your mind will start to re-order its own priorities and deprecate cheap thrills.

Cultivating a sense of joy in learning and experiencing information in your internal world isn’t that difficult, but you need to sort of make sure that other stimuli are set aside. I will turn my computer off and leave electronics out of my reading space so that no vibration, no alert, nothing will ask me for attention - there is so much bullshit calling you to attention that makes a passive activity like reading extremely hard to do.

you can think of your relationship to the world as something inside a meatsuit that is raised from birth to react to what’s outside it. If you do not question or manage this relationship, you will always be pulled outside of yourself by the most engaging/pressing/conditioned thing in your environment.

This is a lot of words without even getting to the task of reading, but this is the stuff that I personally had to internally wrangle before I ever found time to start reading and self study again.

You can rewire yourself to find pleasure in productive tasks. Eschewing marketed entertainment for skill and knowlege building sounds boring, but once you’ve trained yourself to get dopamine from those things it just becomes a new normal.

You’re gonna have to find the discipline to construct a new routine that devalues something like gaming and replaces it with something like reading, and in 2025 that’s not actually easy.