Update: They left. They left and said they cannot ever come back, even if they heal their trauma, even if I heal my trauma, because the relationship itself is too damaged. They also said they're just starting to realize their trauma was way worse than they had realized, and contributed much more to the bad dynamics than they'd thought -- earlier they thought it was mostly mine that was the problem, and as we were discussing the breakup they realized just how much harm their trauma had done to me and even brought my own out too (which hurt them in turn).

We were just doomed. We were just fucked from before the start. We were completely and utterly set up to fail. I'm glad you and your partner were able to reconnect, but my partner is too principled and stubborn to be willing to do that with me -- when they say it's over and they'll never be back, they mean it in a way that I cannot doubt. Honestly, your case is probably a great outlier, most people never reconnect after splitting up.

I don't know what to do with my life now. I restructured so much of my life to be devoted to them. I got through the brutal work days because I wanted to provide for them. I worked on myself to be better because I wanted to grow and heal for them.

Thank you. All my best writing is born out of immense suffering. I wish I didn't have to suffer so much. I'm so tired

Thank you so much. I shouldn't have checked this at work I'm sobbing right now. I'm so scared and heartbroken. When they told me about the longstanding problems they thought I'd leave them over it, but instead I said I wanted to address all the problems so that we could look back on this as the moment we really turned things around and made our relationship healthier than ever. They said they would like that, but since then it seems they've broken too hard to be able to do the work with me. Thanks for giving me a shred of hope that even if we break up now we may be able to reconnect.

White leftists do a phenomenal job at reminding me how little daylight exists between them and their full-fascist settler brethren

Word. I have accounts on other fediverse instances and I never fucking use them for that reason, they're not all that different from reddit. Hexbear at large is the only place that seems decent and if it didn't have this comm I don't know that I'd want to be on this site either.

If you did make a Cookout I'd join

My long term relationship that we both thought was for life is imploding right now, and it’s not even because of anything new and recent, it’s because we finally figured out some unhealthy dynamics got set years ago when we were in worse situations in life and dealing with crises and now that we’re looking at it it’s just unbearable. A lot is my fault, some is their's, but in another way it's neither of our faults, it's just an unavoidable tragedy. It's so depressing to confront how we both were utterly set up to fail in this (or any) relationship by the combined forces of capitalism, systemic racism, and systemic patriarchy. I don't want this to sound like a cop-out, I don't want to say "oh my difficulties with emotions and relationships are not my fault because the systems did this to me and I bear no blame," I can see clearly (now, when it’s too late to prevent them) the mistakes I made. But it's incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking that when they were happening I couldn't have done anything else because of how I was malformed by all the trauma of living in the belly of a racist, murderous empire surrounded by toxic hateful racist monsters. At every step of the way we've been trying our very best (I've been doing therapy for years, and they tried but they just couldn't find a therapist who wasn’t a capitalist radfem shitlib that would gaslight them and do more harm than good), but at every step for years and years and years the traumas carved into us from early childhood through adulthood sabotaged our efforts. They ask, "why did you do X horrible thing when we needed you to do Z?" and when I examine it it's genuinely just because of how the racist fabric of America destroyed my family and destroyed me to the point that X was all I was capable of doing in those times of stress. I didn't get to have a safe environment in which to grow up healthily -- I had a fucking nightmare forced upon me when I was just a little kid and it broke me, just more subtly than it broke my other family members. But it broke me nonetheless. I ask them "why did you do Y when we needed you to do Z?" and when they examine it it's because of how abuse at the hands of the toxic patriarchical fabric of America starting from a very young age carved such deep liabilities and weaknesses into them that they couldn't be healthier. And then our traumas intersected in bad ways. If just one of us hadn't had our fatal weaknesses, we could have maybe helped the other. But with both of us having them, our attempts to help each other actually led us to fall into unhealthy dynamics instead and now the traumatic memories of those dynamics make it -- I think -- impossible to move forward and heal together.

Even with this understanding, even with these big breakthroughs, it may be too late. I think it very likely is even though we desperately want it to not be too late. They said "I don't want us to have to split up. It would be a horrible tragedy. It should be a simple choice: We love each other and didn't mean to do harm, now that we understand what went wrong and how the systems did this to us it should be obvious that we just stay together and fix things together. The reason it's not simple for me is that everything's been so traumatic I don't know if it's possible, healthy, or even ethical for us to try to stay together and fix things together."
And I get that, I really do. It’s not a cop-out, it’s true. So much traumatic shit has happened that I can't humanely and ethically ask them to stay. Asking is pointless anyway -- they already want to stay and make it better, it's just a question of whether that's even possible or healthy for them to try to do, or if too much harm has been done. It's not a decision to be made, it's a yes/no fact that has to be uncovered and then whatever that fact is, we’ll have to deal with it even if we hate it.

I envy white people here, at least the ones with semi-healthy families (unlike my poor, traumatized partner). For all that there's something so fucked up and fundamentally wrong with many of those white folks, they seem happier. They have their own traumas to be sure, but they don’t have the trauma that comes from being nonwhite in this KKK society and right now, looking at how that racial trauma has destroyed my life, I envy them for not having been brutalized that way.

LMAO get fucked, genocidaires. I'm so glad the ghouls who embraced Dick Cheney lost

Downballot Dems told me not to vote for them by either explicitly supporting genocide or being silent on genocide.

I'd be vegan for ideological reasons but I think with my dietary restrictions and issues it'd kill me.

I too believe the fascists should lose, that's why I voted third party instead of staying home

If everyone on the ballot supports genocide or is silent about genocide, then there's nobody to vote for and the decision is made for you.

If anyone on the ballot denounces the genocide in Palestine and their record backs the denunciation up, then you should vote for them.

None of my local Dems said anything against the genocide so I didn't vote for Dems down-ballot either.

Tlaib is the only member of the so-called far-left "Squad" that has not endorsed Harris. The other three members — U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — endorsed Harris in July after Biden announced he was dropping out of the race.

I missed that Ilhan had endorsed Kdolf Hitler, very disappointing.

Based. I voted Green right before the VP said dumb shit about China and trans people so kinda regret voting Green over PSL now, but I also wrote in revolutionary slogans for every other position so they couldn't fill them in for me.

The Democratic Party is for Nazis, I'll give carve-outs to Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for being against the genocide but everyone else supports the genocide and is therefore a Nazi.

Really all it would have taken for me to vote Dem down-ballot was a condemnation of the Party for doing Nazi shit in Palestine. That's not a huge ask. But every Dem on my ballot was either too chickenshit to take a public stance or their public stance is "more genocide please" so of course I don't want them to win either.

There was some bad personal loss during lockdown, but I still miss lockdown so bad. I desperately needed the break from work and having the bonus unemployment actually cover shit instead of how unemployment normally is was gave me time to heal some from years of overwork and burnout.

But they'll never do it again. Even if H5N1 takes off they won't do anything like that again

Would you support him banning AmeriKKKan and Isn'treali developers too, given that their countries' war crimes are far grander in scale, horror, and devastation than Russia's?

They really did. It's been disheartening, alienating, and frightening to watch. I can't be friends with these people anymore, who don't care about genocide, so there go a lot of people I befriended in school.

Disclaimer: you're going to get wildly differing answers because Islam is not a monolith.

Edit: also thank you for asking this respectfully

At least in my experience with the Muslim side if my family, no. There's maybe a little "oh that's different and a little weird, but if someone's queer that's just Allah's plan for them and it's not our place to judge", but there isn't the hatred and condemnation you see in conservative christian cults. It can break more along political lines.

It also gets weird with regional variation, like where my family is from trans people are kind of normal. I was even taught that transness is generally accepted religiously as long as the trans person is straight (so since I'm lesbian that doesn't work as well for me, but whatever).

Generally I consider the "Islam is violently queerphobic" shit essentially a form of colonialist blood-libel to paint Muslim cultures as backwards and oppressive in order to justify committing horrible colonialist and imperialist violence against them, and it's victim-blaming too. Queerness is very culturally dependent -- what is feminine in one culture may be masculine in another. Colonizers exported their queer-bashing ideas during conquest, cracked down on queer communities as removed, reshaped mores in the places they conquered, and now these "enlightened" colonizers have the audacity to condemn the people they colonized for bearing those scars. Of course we're "behind the times" -- you fuckers made us be!

There is certainly room for and indeed a need for conversation and struggle around queer acceptance and liberation in different Islamic cultures, but that's going to vary greatly by region and is less of a theological question and more a cultural question (of course there's a give and take between theology and culture). Islam in Iran is wildly different from Islam in Pakistan is wildly different from Islam in Saudi Arabia is wildly different from Islam in Algeria, and even within those places there is a great amount of variation

I truly think libs are beyond being redeemed, and that even goes for the more "progressive" types who appropriate the label of "democratic socialist" like Bernie and AOC.

I used to think they could be moved left -- after all, many did -- but at this point I no longer believe that. So many of the libs who "moved left" under Trump, at least that I know, are now ride or die for Kdolf Hitler. If they won't grow a soul and reject liberalism because of genocide, they're beyond rehabilitating and aren't worth my time anymore. I'd rather engage with the politically unengaged than with the politically engaged liberal. The unengaged can be woken up to the truth, the engaged liberals see the truth and don't care.

No matter where you live you're wasting your vote if you don't vote third party

Shit I'd hit a button where you specifically die for just $1.

If it's jist a rabdom stranger I wouldn't hit that vutton though. Just you

1st third: Yep

2nd third: lmao what

3rd third: lmao what

Material conditions? Never heard of them.

Basically every successful Communist revolution immediately instates major literacy programs after the initial victory to empower the populace. It isn't a prerequisite.