u/JMetalBlast

Hi there,

You might remember me from my previous post asking about catheter sizes for P valves. My biggest concern was getting one that was too tight, and caused damage to my penis, or too large, leading me to end up covered in piss.

Good news is, I found the right catheter size.

Unrelated to the above ( and not because I found myself covered in piss at the end of my last dive) regardless of your catheter size, please remember to open up your pee valve before you dive. If you don't, that pee will find another place to escape.

You might not even realize until the next day that what you thought was a leak (since the water was cold), was actually cold urine sloshing around your drysuit. This will only become apparent after you put your stuff to dry, and notice an unmistakable smell of urine coating everything you own.

At least that's what others have told me.

I just thought I'd share this personal reflection, and which is completely unconnected to my life experience, or my need to take a shower.

Since many posters in this sub are very knowledgeable about Marxist theory, I'd love to hear some comments on the points made in this article. I'm not nearly well versed enough on the sources to have an opinion.

From the article:

. "But “Cultural Marxism” is having something of a moment. It is not that it is resurgently popular. It is that it has been dragged posthumously into the arena of dispute, where the world’s worst bullfighters are waving red flags in front of its body. A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is a spry genealogy of our strange reality, which traces the conspiracy from Lyndon LaRouche through the New Right to the Tea Party. Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, by contrast, offers a left-wing inversion of the right-wing conspiracy, in which the prominence of the Frankfurt School is explained as the result of a plot to destroy truly revolutionary (“Eastern”) Marxism. The gap between these books is big enough to have been carved over millennia by the Colorado River, and offers an object lesson in the difference between intellectual history that can inform intelligent political action and “intellectual history” that will guide those who believe it straight into the canyon wall."

Since October 7, and especially since the beginning of the war in Iran, a narrative has become gospel in certain circles (such as this subreddit) blaming Israel for everything.

To be clear, Israel is a settler-colonial state carrying out crimes of genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, and also committing wars of aggression against other countries in the region. While this is unquestionably evil, it doesn't mean that they are magical puppet masters controlling every negative thing happening around the world. This includes evidence-free narratives around the JFK assassination, 9/11, Epstein, Charlie Kirk, and even COVID.

For the conspiracy-minded, every other country is a slave to Israel, with people like Trump being nothing but victims of a Zionist blackmailing operation. Tucker Carlson quite openly refers to Trump as a victim of Israel, unable to choose not to go to war with Iran, or to stop funding the genocide.

While this magical, conspiratorial thinking about Israel is not inherently antisemitic, some of the comments that I've read get pretty close to it. Some go as far as claiming that the fact that a Jew is involved in anything must mean that Mossad or Israel must be behind the event in question. Any questioning of these narratives is immediately met with accusations of being a Mossad bot, or of being in favor of whatever "they" are accused of having done. These are Nazi talking points, and it's important to call them out.

In this interview (from about a month ago), Norman Finkelstein discusses some of these issues. As a committed defender of Palestinians, and a persona-non-grata in Israel (often accused of terrorism, antisemitism, holocaust denial, etc.), I assume his words will have a bit more weight than anything I can say on this point.

TL;DR: Israel is a terrible country. That doesn't mean that people should accept crazy conspiracy theories that "sound about right", despite lacking any evidence for them.