No, in the same way how feminists aren't funded by The Big Feminism™, online incels aren't funded by The Big Incel™ or Linux evangelists on Lemmy being funded by GNU project. Not everything has to do with geopolitics or geopolitical influence, it's sometimes just a matter of ideology and communities around these ideologies.
If anything, I'd argue that ML's are closer to being a CIA psyop than some agents of China or some shit
Actual answer: It's pretty much just teens who get radicalized by youtube channels such as wow_mao, yugopnik, hakim, badempanda and most notably thedeprogram podcast, and young students joining ML/Maoist book clubs in their unis though that's more of a hit and miss since some book clubs actually read Marx and Lenin. They have audiences in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions so it's not a "small, underground current".
Through these communities and channels they learn what I'd describe as "falsified pop theory" that usually manifests as exclusively Stalin/Mao and out of context quotes from actual Marxists like Lenin. This results in uncritical support of China and other ML countries like Vietnam and Cuba (all of whom are bourgeois states and literally nothing about them resembles DOTP), embrace of nationalism, maoist third-worldism which is where the "unlimited genocide on the first world" comes from and just endless moralism that you've heard time and time again which is explicitly anti-marxist. At times, they might also show support to Islam for some reason.
If my tone sounds a bit harsh, that's because they've completely bastardized marxism and just continue being more and more annoying with their "agitprop" (making communist memes and throwing them into social media void to spread "marxism" or something, revolution through reddit and lemmy), quote farming, absolute glazing of certain historical figures and just dogshit takes in general.
Yeah, death to all the 18 year old conscripts who are literally forced to join the IDF to commit atrocities (forced conscription), while also being blasted pro-war propaganda by their national bourgeois.
Kill kill kill I love murder I love suicides I love dehumanizing I love proletariat blood flowing if they happen to be on the bad side.
In that case, the best play is probably to practice speaking to others at work, even if it's cringe or small amounts. How would one even go about making friends by constantly being mute? There's no cheat code for speech, and it's especially important for (ex-)shut-ins, as social skills such as speech are kind of a muscle that can atrophy, which is where many problems come from.
Btw speaking of exhaustion issues, are you eating enough? I had a similar issue myself where I'd be exhausted after shift, with hardly enough time to recover my muscles and energy and it got fixed after I stopped skipping lunch and just ate more nutritious meals. If that's the case for you, maybe this could give you enough energy to get stuff done after work and on weekends such as finding groups of people in communities that interest you? It's also a very much viable alternative if you can't find anyone at your job.
Yeah, after you're out of school it becomes really difficult to make friends (especially as someone who's different), but it does happen eventually be it due to changing jobs and what not. Until then, you kinda have to rely on online friends for socializing so you don't go Insane.
Also, dunno what you're like IRL but it's possible the issue could stem from you, it's something you have to look into how you act yourself and see how you come off. Maybe you're acting in a way that's too unapproachable, and is there any way you can change that?
If theres any tips I could give you, it'd be practice small talk with coworkers if you get the chance to maintain social skills, change jobs once you're able every once in a while to also change the people.
You're still like 20, you still have 8+ years of your youth remaining so there's time.
Have you tried just giving the friend MP code and them joining through it? Worked for me without any zerotier, so it could be repack dependent. I used the GOG version.
Why? US foreign policy hasn't changed since manifest destiny so threats to attack are literally nothing new, it's still ""aiding"" a lot of western countries with stationed soldiers in case some countries outside the western bloc decides to attack, nuclear tests is a bit more iffy after the cold war, but can easily be justified by wars breaking out, trade war isn't in the interests as well given how they have a very large economy and losing American products from all their companies would be horrible (imagine all the tech for instance)...
There's genuinely no reason to cut ties with US for any country, doing so would just shoot it in the foot since you lose one of the largest economies for trade.
When we're talking raw resources that can potentially be turned into things needed to provide for the people, then yes there is easily enough. Today you have a lot of people living on a subsistence level, but also a ton of potential arable land, resources to be mined, production to be refocused that can provide for said people.
However, unless we get rid of capitalism (tired trope but hopefully I can provide substance below), then even in the best case scenario of how capitalism can develop from here on will this idea of "providing for everyone" remain impossible.
The main issue here isn't "the rich" or them not being taxed (which others blame in the thread), but how capitalist mode of production fundamentally organizes production - goods aren't produced to satisfy human needs (use value), but strictly for profit (exchange value) as commodities, to be bought and sold.
If you have millions of malnourished lower-class people and a million middle and upper strata demanding more luxuries, the latter's demand will always be prioritized while the former's will until things get desperate that production for them finally leads to desired margins and profit rates. Why produce cheap commodities whose main buyers have very limited purchasing power (therefore a low cap on growth) when a business can produce a commodity that turns more profit and whose buyers are more wealthy, leading to more potential growth?
That's not to mention overproduction, the need of a reserve army of labor which are unemployed people kept on a brink of poverty to compete in the labor market to keep wages down and therefore profit up, and many other funny things. To change this fundamentally, one would have to ditch production for profit and instead replace it with production to satisfy human needs via economic planning - anything short of that is not enough and results in "capitalism coated in X".
The interest group that both propagated Keynesianism and ended it was the exact same, what changed their attitude was the profit rate boom from WW2 finally drying up and that economic philosophy no longer being sustainable as a result.
Like 40 million working class people are about to lose their SNAP benefits in the US, but everyone seems to care about some clown house that most people aren't going to even visit.
