religion is a tool of oppression used by the bourgeoisie and that multifaceted oppression is used on the daily to keep us from fighting the class war,

Yes, and that additionally it can and has been equally a revolutionary tool to mobilize the masses against oppression. And to shun it completely would be reductive.

I am aware. My replies, however, were addressed to you. I am simply moving the conversation towards a wider scope that doesn’t mystify religion and reduce it to something inherently bad or irrational.

These are not two distinct oppressions. Religion is part of the superstructure (i.e. the state, the laws, the culture, etc.) which is held up by the class struggle and the socioeconomic dynamics of power. Religion, like the state, is simply the tool and not the cause of oppression.

In a capitalist society, the superstructural institutions are mobilized to protect capital. Those could and were effectively conquered by the oppressed class at times in recent history, including religion. An example would be liberation theology in Latin America, or the movements of Marxist Muslim scholars in Central and South Asia.

Sure, but it seems those same structures remain in place today but in a secularized form. Nation-States create this divisive sentiment which the bourgeois classes utilise in order to bid the oppressed against each others. The struggle between the state and the church is secondary to the material struggle between an upper and a lower class.

Yeah, because his library is full of Islamist and Salafi literature.

You could open gmail inside a separate firefox container. As long as you don’t use the email beyond school purposes it would be fine.

I’m afraid you’re being maliciously obtuse. There is no need to criticize my pretty regular vocabulary. And the fact that you think the USA hasn’t historically been at the center of the imperialist propaganda machine fruther confirms the need to end our conversation.

The comment above that I replied to had the effect, regardless of intentions, of dismissing and whitewashing the actions of past US administrations, in a way that reduces the illegal invasions of the current administration into an exceptional, idiosyncratic, and one-off behavior. The reality is the US has been hated worldwide for far too long, at least since the end of WW2. I hope I was informative and pertinent enough according to your standards.

The internet is not a neutral space. A country having its own social media platforms instead of letting American companies harvest their citizens’ data is not truly censorship.

their polling indicates they have no idea the level of propaganda they are being faced with every day.

You’re being solipsistic. Not everything you disagree with based on personal whims is “propaganda.”

Didn’t even need to, I walked there fine.

No don’t worry the US had already been using those since manifest destiny.

So invading Afghanistan and Iraq was justifiable enough for you?

Normal, perhaps, in the sense that it is common, but being culturally ingrained is no indication of whether it’s normal in the sense of being human nature

This question is up for debate because some may see limerence as an evolutionary trait within humans and other creatures (like something as benign as sneezing, which can’t be good or bad in and of itself), while others may conceive of it as a social construct. I think both claims are not mutually exclusive; limerence being a social construct does not preclude its material existence, that is, it does not make it any less real; but culture definitely shapes the way we think of limerence and express it.

I view limerence as unsustainable in the long term, but because reciprocation can transform it into genuine love I find it hard to consider it inherently pathological.

Anways, I hope you enjoy the book in case you do read it.

I’m in a similar situation. I did inidvidual backups for each app that offers such a feature and copied them into a hard drive with all the photos and other files that I need. It’s arduous the first time but it becomes easier the next time you do a full backup. I have an organized folder which contains subfolders for each app and for photos, downloads, etc. All backup files are exported into their respective folder. It takes me all in all up to 15 minutes.

It’s unfair to imply that Islam has been stagnant for a millennia, when in reality numerous scholars from across the globe have contributed so much to Islamic jurisprudence and still do. “Islam” is a very wide notion and cannot be reduced to a historically and spacially specific vision thereof. You cannot find the same Sharia law in two Muslim countries. Some countries even accomodate different Islamic rites by providing them with parallel legal systems.

Last time I used it was three years ago.

You can download and remove the DRM from the borrowed book following this tutorial.

The struggle of being a bourgeois, liberal state.

Don’t love your job, job your love.

People ignore the global impact the dissolution had. Socialist parties everywhere either rebranded to a neoliberalized form of social democracy or lost their traction. Entire labor movements collapsed and capitalist governments backpedaled on lots of welfare reforms that the working classes fought for with their blood, because there was no more a socialist global power to compete with.