What communities are you subscribing to where you’re seeing all this political content? I hardly see any posts about politics and I’ve made no particular effort to filter it out of my feed. I just subscribe to tech communities. Just subscribe to communities about the topics you’re interested in and don’t subscribe to politics/news/current events communities?

Prefacing this by saying this is in no way directed towards you/meant to undermine your post, but IQ really is racist pseudoscience. “Low IQ” is always used as a cudgel against people who otherwise do not come across as unintelligent (such as yourself, imo) to discredit them. I’m thinking of a lot of instances of young Black people who have been subjected to the criminal justice system and their demands for autonomy being dismissed with BS “low IQ” claims (despite the fact that they come across perfectly eloquently in their writings).

I don’t have personal experience with addiction so I can’t give targeted advice there, but I know there is support out there to help people overcome addictions. If you’re worried about getting a job, definitely you can learn a trade, find an apprenticeship or something like that. I do also have a diagnosed learning disability btw, and didn’t finish high school because of it, and in my opinion the only ways that has held me back is through school systems refusing to accommodate for my learning style. I’ve had no problem self-teaching myself skills aligning with my interests like programming. I’m not saying that applies to all intellectually disabled people, but evaluating your intelligence by school performance is a really shit way to do so especially if you have any kind of learning disability or neurodiversity. Some years at school I would get Cs and Ds, some years at school I would get straight A*s; is it more likely that my intelligence wildly fluctuated between years, or more likely that there are so many circumstantial factors that affect academic performance far more than inherent intelligence?

You and I define “heavily left-wing” quite differently then. The far-left has always supported gun rights and armed struggle. It’s the political centre and parts of the right that are blanket anti-gun.

How is that inconsiderate? That’s just informal

(Using “bi” to mean “bisexual”, I mean, not “business intelligence” lol)

Feel free to not take this advice, but I feel it wouldn’t be negligent if I didn’t at least share this. For me, the way I got over any despair over personal circumstances or difficulties, a very long time ago, was to focus entirely on the social root causes, not any individualised approach. The issues you talk about with employment, cost of living, even the nuclear family, are rooted in capitalism and class society. I don’t distress about my struggles with these things; I focus my time on communist organising and am at peace knowing I am doing all that I can do to change things. If things don’t get better for me personally, I have the hope that they will be better for the next generation, or generations down the line, and I know I have lived a life of dignity and self-respect by resisting. I read the book Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, when I was a teenager, and found the concept of, and Huey’s explanation of, revolutionary suicide to be very good at articulating all this.

Of course, this is quite particularised advice if you aren’t already inclined towards far-left politics. But this is why I have never seriously entertained the thought of suicide since I was 12, and it is what I would’ve needed to hear/know at that age, so I figured I’d share. The whole “it gets better” bullcrap never worked on me cause my life was objectively awful due to societal factors, so if I had only followed conventional advice for these kinds of issues I would definitely be dead by now. So maybe this more unconventional advice will help someone. If you want it in more conventional terms, you could think of it as “live for a cause, not for yourself”, but I think it’s important to recognise how it is also to improve your own conditions and the conditions of people like you.

We don’t replace prisons, because putting people in cages is bad. There’s nothing to “replace” them with. If I wanted to “replace” prisons I wouldn’t want to abolish them. That’s like asking what you’ll replace slavery with, how on earth are we going to get cheap labour otherwise.

Bourgeois law should be abolished too. I have no respect for “the law”.

Well, fundamentally capitalism involves the deprivation of the means of subsistence and production from one class so that they are forced to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class in order to obtain the means of subsistence. You could define that as “mistreatment” or not I guess, but whether or not you do, personal treatment by your capitalist does not change the form capitalism takes. Workers’ power comes from combining. Capitalists are already combined—they work together to keep wages low and prices high. Unionising only levels the playing field in that regard.

I’m not saying that you should always focus on unionisation in every situation—sometimes there is more important political work to be done. But if you have nothing else to do, it’s often the most accessible starting point.

I would disagree, and I personally know people who have unionised IT workers. I also personally know people who have unionised workers at small companies. I don’t understand why you would say unionisation is not relevant to you? If you’re a worker then it is relevant.

Linux distro shouldn’t really matter here. Given what you’ve said, I would recommend using Debian just because it’s the most popular server distro and a lot of server guides will either assume you’re on Debian, or have instructions for Debian. For instance, if you see suggestions to install software using sudo apt install software-name-here, that’s for Debian.

You would probably want to use Docker for this. There are instructions on how to install Jellyfin with Docker here.

Join an organisation agitating for proletarian revolution. If there aren’t any near you, you can start with trade union work to build a mass of militant workers that can form the base of a political organisation.

I don’t upload photos anywhere public for this reason. For screenshots I just strip the exif data, and if it’s a screenshot that goes from edge to edge of a screen, I resize it so as to not give away info on the size of my screen. I also don’t share the same image in multiple places. If I have any kind of custom theming (fonts or colours) in a screenshot I also usually change it to something more generic, unless the point of the screenshot itself is to showcase the theming.

I just use my note taking app

None? I’ve never felt the need to. I’m not categorically opposed to it, but it’s never occurred to me that I should block a particular user.

Not really, open source projects don’t necessarily have to be open to all contributors and I was aware of this already. They have to be open to anyone doing what they want with the code, by definition, which is good, but they don’t have to allow everyone to contribute to upstream. I’m not sure if there’s any particular defence against this being used in a discriminatory manner, but I do think this effect is significantly mitigated by the decentralised nature of open source and the fact that it’s not too uncommon for forks to become preferred over the original, the fact that open source projects rise and fall in popularity, etc.

I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.

Yes, but less so than with gay men. A lot of lesbians won’t identify as either, since penetrative sex is not super common with lesbians, but there are also some lesbians with a strong preference to either penetrate or be penetrated and not the other way round.

I like doing tech stuff as a hobby yeah. Don’t remember why I signed up for Lemmy but I have been aware of it for years before I signed up. I think I wanted to have a place to talk about FOSS but also in a community that was generally aligned with my political views (hence my decision to sign up for lemmy.ml)

Most folks on the planet are Indian, Chinese, or in an Islamic country of some sort. Now do tell, dear blakeus12. How do all of those cultures treat LGBTQ+ people :|

I’ve lived in at least one of the countries you’ve mentioned. LGBTQ+ people exist and live in the same capacity they do in western Europe and North America. It seems ridiculous for a westerner to try to implicate global majority countries for queerphobia when the US and UK are currently on a trans exterminatory cultural rampage. Stones in glass houses shit.

I think you shouldn’t assume everyone on the internet to be a man. It is misogynistic. I don’t think there would be anything wrong with e.g. referring gender neutrally to someone who turns out to be a woman because you didn’t check her profile which says she’s a woman, but it is annoying to see people assume everyone on the internet to be male. I’ve especially experienced this in more techy communities which definitely seems like sexist stereotyping to me.

Yes, I still moderate a subreddit which is a support group for a particular surgery. There isn’t such a community on the fediverse and the group of people who need this surgery seem to be few in number here too. (Won’t be any more specific about the nature of the subreddit or surgery for privacy reasons, before anyone asks)

I still use Discord, but once I get round to setting up my own Matrix server I’ll set up a Discord bridge with my most important friend group servers and move off it for good.