InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided]

Life will adapt it always does

Life will, sure. But that doesn’t mean we (humans) will. Or even mammals. Life itself will prevail, that doesn’t mean our favorite clades are excused from the chopping block, including the one we’re on, which is actually in a rather precarious position as a large highly complex animal with highly complex needs and requirements for even the most minimal kind of survival. It frustrates me when people, especially leftists, act like climate change is just going to disrupt the geopolitical order (which yes, it is going to do that lol) and maybe kill off a bunch of species that will be sad to see go, making it “hard” for us, but ultimately won’t effect us much beyond that. No, this threat is almost certainly an existential one. I’ve said it before but it’s not a choice between socialism or barbarism. It’s socialism or annihilation. Communism will win, given enough time, but how long before that time is up? We don’t know, so we cannot afford in any sense of the word to wait any more.

Is it just “it’s afraid”? Is it the desperate flailing of a failing colony? No one cares if you say “Free Hawaii” because the powerful aren’t worried about Hawaii being freed?

Yes, pretty much this.

Israel might actually fall relatively soon. And because there are actual existential threats to Israel looming right now, the fascist’s immune response is kicked into high gear specifically for it. The response to opposition is proportional to how much of a threat they think it poses. For example, Red Scares happen when the left has the strength and numbers to potentially harm the bourgeois rule and order. The international and domestic hatred of and opposition to Israel is frightening them, as it should. They’re getting increasingly desperate to tamp it down.

I’d love to read Xi Mingze’s perspective on all of… this. I wonder what she thinks of the rampant, incessant, unhinged sinophobia drooling and frothing out from the mouths and the worm-eaten brains not just of conservatives but of the liberal “intellectuals” here, especially considering she must have been surrounded by some of them at Harvard. Even if most of the ones she would come into contact with might view her as fellow nobility albeit from the enemy side, the absurd hatred of the see-see-pee and her dad, the gommulist dictator Xi must not be an easy thing to endure.

I’m assuming, maybe incorrectly, that he immigrated to a country in the west. If that’s the case, when did that happen and why? These are questions I also assume you, OP can answer for us without having to further question him.

UPDATE

Damn, I had been looking forward to answers to a bunch of the great questions that were posed. I’m really curious what specifically made him mad, though. Like,

one of the questions I gave him threw him off and kinda put him in a bad mood

Which question was it? And when he said “who would ask such stupidity?” was it about that particular question or the things you were asking him in general?

I don’t really know what he was expecting but he seems to think the questions weren’t good enough.

I’m sure it will be apparent when you post the 5 detailed answers he did give, but I think it would have been good if we had known beforehand what kind of general sentiment he has about the USSR. I would ask different questions of someone I knew looked back on the USSR fondly with nostalgia versus someone who saw it mostly as an impediment to the way they wanted to live. I realize it’s probably too late now, but if you get the chance and it doesn’t seem inappropriate, I want to know what kind of questions he wanted us to ask. Since he agreed to do it in the first place, even if he didn’t quite understand the situation, I would think there must have been something he did want to share - but what was it?

Edit: Sorry for the poorly written wall of text. I just started typing without thinking and before I knew it there was a novella. But tldr: having type 1 diabetes is a big deal and requires constant vigilance or you die.

Yes, you came away with an accurate picture of type 1 diabetes, good summary. I lived with a type 1 diabetic for a while and it was a constant battle to keep her levels in a safe range. On the one hand, taking it was second nature for her, but it became so automatic that she would often forget how many units she took. Did she take too much? Then she was about to “have a low” where she would get extremely woozy, tired, sweaty, and unable to think (literally, it became very hard for her to reason or remember what was going on when the low was bad, compounding the issue) and if it wasn’t taken care of, she would lose consciousness at which point we would have to call an ambulance. Fortunately, to stop this if it was caught in time, required drinking tons of orange juice and eating diabetic glucose tablets. But that would cause her blood sugar to spike, leading to her “having a high” (not the fun kind) which made her extremely sick, wired, anxious (understandably) and as you read, seriously harming multiple organs and systems. Part of living with her carried the responsibility of learning how to inject an emergency drug when she passed out from a low in an emergency situation as well as the insulin if she became too incapacitated from a high. (And to be clear, that’s high levels of blood sugar, absolutely not a “high” in the traditional sense). To her own admission, she was very forgetful too. There were many times that anything happening had to be canceled because she forgot her insulin. This was never an issue to me, I always tried to be totally understanding, but it really upset her because she always felt like she screwed things up for everyone around her and also scared herself because her forgetfulness could so easily lead to a life-threatening situation. Whenever going literally anywhere, the first question was always “did you remember your insulin and glucose?” And yet still sometimes we would run into situations where it was “oh shit, I actually don’t have my insulin.”

Essentially, she had to be her own pancreas, ceaselessly keep track of her levels and take in glucose or insulin depending on where they were. And she had the help of modern technology, with small implants she would inject under her skin (that would have to be replaced every couple days and were also expensive on top of the expensive insulin) which when working ideally, would monitor her blood sugar level and transmit that information to a dedicated device she wore at all times, later her smartphone. But it often wouldn’t work right for all sorts of reasons, from just plain getting her levels wrong and misreporting, to defective temporary implants not sending a signal, to only working within a certain range - too high and it couldn’t accurately read the levels anymore. So she also had to constantly do it the old fashioned way by poking herself, usually her hand, and testing the blood directly, sometimes getting different results from that method vs her “dexcom” unit and having to split the difference, hoping that both weren’t wrong, which was literally life-threatening.

It was an ever-present condition. Every meal she ate had to be taken into account not just how many carbs (glucose, essentially) it had, but how fast those carbs get metabolized, and of course when she ate it relative to when she last took her insulin or would next be able to take her insulin dose. It becomes expected background after a while, but it can never be actually forgotten or she would die. An analogy is that she is on a rollercoaster she can never get off of, at any given point in time she is either going high with her levels or dropping low. Both are inevitable, but the goal is to try to always keep them from the extremes, never too high, never too low, injecting insulin and consuming glucose, respectively, as those highs and lows occur. But they are inevitable. And going too far with one inevitably means she’ll go too far in the other direction to correct it, yo-yo’ing until something similar to a balance is found again.

And as u/fox said. before insulin was able to first be isolated from pigs, and is now synthetically produced, you were not long for this world if you were type 1 diabetic. It was a 100% mortality rate. My friend was a rare case too, in that more often, type 1 diabetics have it from childhood. She developed it in her 30’s from being otherwise totally healthy and she doesn’t know why. I could keep writing a whole other wall of text about how much this cost her, at times thousands of dollars a month, paying for insulin so as not to die and how it’s functionally no different than holding a gun to her head and saying “pay us or we pull the trigger.” Or the sheer incompetence of the industry she relies on for all of this, with people who she’s trying to get to understand that her monitoring equipment is failing an needs to be immediately fixed or replaced. Like imagine the last time you dealt with customer service for some tech device and the shit they put you through, now imagine that your life literally depending on finding a solution fast. And the constant fear of who knows what kind of shit going down, due to new laws she has no say in or supply chain collapase, or simply running out of money, such that she won’t be able to get more insulin and will, simply, die.

She is also an excellent cook, like one of the best I’ve ever known. Her whole family are like hardcore culinary enthusiasts, she has walls of bookshelves with cookbooks (she had to sell over 2000 cookbooks she had for space and money). Ethical vegetarian too, but still does the dairy thing so not vegan.

But sure. All she needs to do is take some cooking classes and no more diabetes. She’ll be fucking thrilled.

I just got banned from /c/tankiejerk@lemmy.dbzer0.com for being a Hexbear. Modlog reason: “Hexbear user in tankiejerk, waddaya expect?”

Meanwhile, there’s like 20 of y’all in this thread and are left untouched. I guess that makes me the one true leftist, the only one who isn’t a liberal.

Here is the evil authoritarian statement I made that got me banned: