Hey everyone! ralsei-wave I’m an American dude who just joined after lurking for a few months here. I got burnt out from basically every other social media being filled with slop and overall terrible things and the vibes here seem much nicer. I’m a university student in my early 20s and I only recently got around to embracing leftism (a lot of things in the past few years have popped the lib bubble I used to be in) so if anyone has any recommendations for baby’s first political theory reading, I’d be happy to check it out! Looking to get a much more concrete understanding of the world and its politics.

I’m a pretty casual gamer, but I’m a huge Undertale/Deltarune fan (part of why I joined was because you all have so many UT/DR emojis spamton sans-troll noelle-flushed susie-nudge ) (oh and I like Omori too kel-bliss ).

Now I’m just going to rattle off some other stuff about myself: I like physics and astronomy, I also like history (if anyone has any good history books please let me know), I love music, I’m a pro wrestling fan, I’ve dabbled in anime (I’ve really only watched Dungeon Meshi but I liked it a lot and I’m watching Cowboy Bebop now), I’m still figuring out how I feel about calling myself aro and/or ace, I suspect I might be on the autism spectrum (no diagnosis though).

Hoping to have a good time here with all of you people hexbear-retro

      • PolyethylenePt2 [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        Thanks for the post! Lots and lots of interesting stuff in there. Side note: does anyone know any good places to get physical copies for some of these books? I’ll see if I can check these books out from a library but I might want to keep some of these books later on. Or I might just get one of those tablet book readers idk

        • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          I highly recommend getting an eReader, if you want to “collect” theory. I have a few physical versions of books I especially like, such as Elementary Principles of Philosophy, Capital: Volume 1, and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, but getting books can be expensive! I do recommend checking out Thriftbooks, though, they usually have reasonable prices.

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    11 days ago

    You will get a bunch of different answers on political theory, but my first recommendation is always Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels. It’s always my recommendation, but I think it’s especially appropriate here because it spends a while discussing relevant details about the history of philosophy and, as someone who has long held an interest in that subject, I thought it was compelling and the parts I was already familiar with were completely accurate (aside one clause’s worth of obvious hyperbole about the Greeks). You can also find a free audiobook of it if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in that I find pleasant to listen to.

    Cowbee will have you covered and will probably also mention this text, but if you want more input from me on anything, feel free to ask.

    • PolyethylenePt2 [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      10 days ago

      I really should play Undertale Yellow. I’ve always heard good things about it but I’ve never gotten around to checking it out. How’s the experience compared to UTDR (without spoiling anything)?

      • martletutyfan [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        Generally it’s more difficult, but it’s manageable enough (at least in the Pacifist Route I haven’t played the other routes), and there *is * an easy mode. The art and cast are very good though (and the original characters are much more prominent than the original Undertale ones, Flowey excepted… though I feel the game portrays very well, without spoiling too much) and the music is excellent. There’s some criticisms I have towards it (they’re spoilery mostly but a non-spoilery one is that ACTs don’t do too much in boss fights which is a shame), but given it’s a free game it’s a very good deal. If people get brainrot over your character you’ve succeeded in making an Undertale fangame I believe. BTW there’s also the fanmde Shades of Justice mod which adds more content related to specific characters (and there’s more on the way)! I really like the mod so if you like the game I recommend playing it after vanilla.

  • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.net
    4·
    10 days ago

    Welcome to hexbear!

    A first wonderful book in my opinion is Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds”. It dispels a ton of the anticommunist and fascist-whitewashing propaganda that we’ve all been exposed to in the west in a very engaging and accessible manner.

    Maybe not a history book in the usual sense, but there’s an ongoing weekly reading club in Hexbear and we’re reading “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Walter D. Rodney. Also maybe arguably not so historical but history-related, if you’re a nerd of metrics as I am (I’m a physicist so I get ya) Albert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in the Soviet Union” and “Is the Red Flag Flying” are absolute bangers if you wanna learn more about the material life in the Soviet Union.

    Finally, if you like the video format, there’s a YouTube channel called Hakim that I can highly recommend, he’s an Iraqi marxist-leninist who has lots of videos explaining socialism, explaining liberalism and its shortcomings, and talking about the consequences of capitalism.

  • roux [they/them, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    11 days ago

    Welcome! Cowbee’s reading list isn’t an intro, it’s a masterclass list. But with that said, I couldn’t agree more with the order of the material. One of the best book’s they recommended to me is Elementary Principles of Philosophy and that is in section 2. I can’t stress enough how important understanding dialectics is when reading theory. It’s gonna be intimidating at first but once it clicks, it will open up a whole new way of looking at how human conditions really are.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      11 days ago

      Sorry lemmy world preemptively defederated from hexbear as a last resort when our tech staff finally worked their code magic to reconnect us to the wider fediverse a few years back.