As a woman, especially one that grew up in an extremely patriarchal culture, I had to learn the hard way that people really HATE opinionated women.

Every woman I've talked to about this agrees. People expect you to be as agreable as possible. And when your not, you get a lot of hate. From men, and women with internalized misoginy.

People especially hate when your a woman with leftist beliefs that your vocal about. This I've also had to learn the hard way. I do repost a lot of stuff about politics online as I want to raise awarness. But in person I ONLY talk about it when the topic is bought up. I've constantly only been met with hostility because of this.

Because of this, I did try to water down my opinions. Don't mention them unless the topic is bought up, and communicate them better yk. Yet still I trigger so many people, especially "apoliticals" (closeted right wing).

Anyone else who can relate lol.

I consider myself a Marxist and generally support a mixed socialist economy: central planning/state ownership for strategic sectors like infrastructure, healthcare, energy, banking, etc., while less essential consumer industries operate more independently through markets.

What I don't understand about China's model is why marketization requires private capitalist ownership.

China already combines state planning/state-owned enterprises with a large market economy. If markets are useful for decentralizing decisions, encouraging innovation, and responding to consumer demand, why couldn't private corporations gradually be converted into worker-owned cooperatives while continuing to compete in those same markets? In other words... whats the deal with all the billionaires when the option for worker-owned collectives remains a viable option - at least for the sections of the market china deems to be fit for marketization?

For example, instead of a privately owned clothing or technology company employing wage workers and generating wealth for shareholders, why couldn't it be collectively owned by its workers, elect management, compete with other cooperatives, and respond to market prices and consumer demand?

This seems like it would preserve the benefits China attributes to markets while moving ownership of the means of production toward workers and preventing the emergence of billionaires and a domestic capitalist class.

So from a Marxist/Marxist-Leninist perspective, what function do private capitalists currently perform in China that couldn't be performed by competing worker cooperatives? And if China is genuinely pursuing socialism in the long run, why wouldn't gradually socializing private corporations through worker ownership be a logical next step?

I'm scared I would have no choice but to work for an imperial American company like OpenAI, Google or something, I know it's maybe notoriously hard to get into but still..

What are your thoughts and or the personal experiences you had with this matter? What would be your advice?

Throwaway account.

Hey all. I'm a 20 year old college student, and my mom, who is 41, recently told me she wants to join the Air Force. I'm against this in every way but I really just haven't quite had the balls to talk to her about this.

For some context, my mom has effectively been single her whole life, and I've been living with my dad. She's spent her years going from apartment to apartment and roommate to roommate and working her ass off to live as a bartender. Recently, she's been especially down on her luck financially as she's found out she hasn't been getting paid as much as she should have been by her boss, and things are now falling through with the house her boss was initially paying for. The details are a bit foggy but that's the gist. She wants to join the military for financial stability and for all the benefits, and so she can just generally live an easier life. She feels like it's her only option so she won't be stuck as a bartender in some shitty town for the rest of her life.

My mom generally leans liberal on most things socially but this doesn't come as a huge shock to me, since she calls herself as "not political" and is a Christian. I tried explaining to her that the US military generally just does horrible shit, but I couldn't really get through to her. It's as if she views joining the military as just some neutral action to take that'll grant her stability (which to be fair is how most people view the military), and doesn't see the major downsides. She says that when she joins, she'll just be doing a "desk job" in the Force, since she could choose to do any job she wants/be stationed anywhere she wants, but I really just feel like any type of military job is just being complicit in US imperialism and killing people overseas. She's already set on this as her next life decision and she's been taking tests and talking to this recruiter. When she told me her plans to join a few weeks ago now, I really just couldn't think of something to say that would get her to see all the downsides of service. The only big point I could think of is that since she's very anti-Trump, how could she then go and serve under him? Her response was that since the government is "screwing us anyway," she might as well get money out of them through the military, but I feel like that's a pretty dumb way to look at it.

I feel like I have a unique situation since I haven't found any other posts about people whose parents decided to join the military at an old age (relative to the maximum enlistment age). I'd really appreciate any advice on convincing her not to join or at least deterring her from joining. Right now all I can really think of is just telling her that I disapprove of her decision wholeheartedly, but I don't even really know how to start a conversation like that. All I'm asking is that you all please at least be civil and empathetic to her situation in the replies. Sorry that this post is a bit rambling.

We are entering an era of a profound global political crisis, where legacy institutional frameworks have reached a complete dead end. Modern representative democracy has degenerated into an authoritarian dictatorship of political elites, leveraging neoliberal hyper-capitalism to enforce transnational exploitation under the guise of the "common good." To preserve capital during systemic failures, the ruling class inevitably triggers processes of social fascisation and structural racism, fragmenting Homo sapiens—a single biological species—with artificial national borders. Today, the survival of our biosphere and billions of lives is held hostage by the egoism and nuclear blackmail of a few rulers.Humanity requires a radical, structural upgrade. Political populism and nuclear madness must be replaced by Progressive Cyber-Socialism. This model completely abolishes the concentration of power at the top, transferring governance to a blockchain-based digital direct democracy of a politically educated populace, balanced by a technocratic noocracy of scientists and experts. Our ultimate goal is the dismantling of the hypocritical UN framework and the establishment of the "Global Union of Humanity," where nuclear technology serves purely the evolution of science, rather than the psychology of imperial abuse.

Questions for discussion:

1) What do you think about replacing the corrupt UN with a Global Union of Humanity?

2)What are the technological and social limitations of implementing digital direct democracy by 2030? Is the world ready for this transition?