CicadaSpectre

For context, I'm a USian who became interested in Islamic cultures as a young adult, and from there found something magnetic about the faith of Islam.

I have many LGBT friends, and whenever I've reached out to mosques, the answers I get are rather disappointing. The best one I've gotten still invalidates homosexual relationships. I'm cishet, but as I said I have many LGBT friends, and I'm also poly. I have a comrade who is trans and converted to Islam, and I see that many LGBT Muslims exist, but this confounds me, too. Even the most open-minded of them will say something is "what Muslims believe" and then clarifies that it is from a Hadith, not strictly from the Quran. The comrade I know is a "Quranic" Muslim - one who follows the Five Pillars and the teachings of the Quran itself, and I know the Hadith are controversial outside of the majority of Sunni Islam.

I want to be a more spiritual person, but the type of Islam I encounter promotes teachings I know in my heart to be wrong. I know, too, that many Christians, Muslims, and Jews have this odd personal combat with God, for lack of a better term - a struggle with the divine, wherein they work out various personal sins/failings or disagreements with the scripture. I know Jews that eat pork, Muslims who drink, Christians who don't pray. I sense there's a spirit to the faiths that is more important than adherence to prescriptions of the text.

I am white (part Native American, but this isn't visible in my appearance or culture). No part of my lineage comes from any land associated with Islam. It feels like appropriation for me to want to convert to a faith, but then pick and choose which parts of it I want to believe and follow. I dabble in tarot and the occult. I'm poly. I believe all consensual love is valid and sacred. So, I guess my question is aimed more towards the Muslim comrades here who are LGBT or allies, who balance the secular with the spiritual, who might be able to show me the way:

How can I call myself a Muslim without compromising my beliefs? Is there a sect or denomination I can seek guidance from? Am I just wasting my - and your - time?

I'm currently an emergency certified teacher, but I'm really interested in maritime work and know a little bit about the career path and some options of how to navigate it.

I tried finding a maritime community on Lemmygrad, but I didn't have much luck, so if it exists I'd appreciate a redirect. Any comrades here familiar with maritime work and law?

I've got some friends who want to move to Shenzhen. I used to live in Beijing for a time as a ESL teacher. I don't really enjoy teaching, and I want to do maritime work, but I also rather miss China. So, I was curious: can I live in China, doing maritime work? As an ESL teacher I know companies will hire and help me with visas and the like in order to live there, but shipping is an altogether different matter. I know in most countries, maritime work hires foreign nationals all the time, but it's also a security thing. As an American citizen, would it be possible for me to get a Chinese visa and work in the maritime industry while living there?

This is really just a pipe dream at the moment. I don't have much maritime experience, and I don't have a maritime job at the moment. This is more of a five-year plan type of situation - something to start working towards, if possible.

Any help would be appreciated!

I'm an emergency certified teacher for geography in middle school in the US. Our textbooks are most odious propaganda I've ever had to witness, and I just can't deal with it. I managed to swing some alternative sources when we covered Eastern Europe and Western Russia, and when we covered China, but now we're going over Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Russia.

The textbook is just vile. Takes any opportunity to overrepresent every negative aspect of socialist countries in ways obvious to people like us, but innocuous to children. I've been struggling to balance my lessons in a way that teaches the regions, but isn't brainrot. Some of the stuff I can let slide and use the textbook for, but anything Soviet related is written in an insanely biased way.

We have to rush through the region to catch up to where other classes are, so I only need a few days' worth of material, but it's difficult to find things on YT that cover history of the region that's 1) easy for kids to understand, and 2) doesn't try and make the region out to be some kind of nightmare.

I'm painting a Stormcast army in an original color scheme, and I know so little about their organization. Do I need to invent a whole Stormhost for them, or can individual Chambers/Conclaves of a Stormhost have their own unique names, color schemes, etc.? I'm more familiar with 40K Astartes structures, or Chaos warbands. The military structure of the Stormcast sort of confuses me. I imagine Stormhosts are more like Astartes Legions, with individual Chambers varying in color schemes and character like the Astartes Chapters. Since AoS is very open to making your army your own.

I thought I saw something about a Chamber from one of the big Stormhosts that took on the symbols and colors of one of the Cities of Sigmar. I'd like to tie my Stormcast to my (hopefully) future Cities of Sigmar army, thematically and lorewise.

Last of the repaint 'Mechs I have so far, it's the Lyran Guards from the Lyran Commonwealth. A pretty popular color scheme and I can see why. The cyan and white really pop.

The Lyran Commonwealth is a German-coded faction with a heavy emphasis on mercantilism, to the point where their military suffers from "social officers" - officers who merely buy their ranks and positions, rather than based on their quality. At one point, the Lyran Commonwealth joins up with the Federated Suns to form the Federated Commonwealth, becoming the dominant power for awhile. War and internal divisions inevitably lead to them breaking apart, though.

I'm really happy with how these turned out, though. Very crisp. Some of my best work with any minis.

Second lance I repainted in canon colors: the Free Worlds Guards of the Free Worlds League. I went with which color schemes I liked best, not the best names.

The Free Worlds League is really more of a loose confederation of various duchies and individual worlds that united for mutual defense. They are, canonically, paralyzed by this lack of centralized leadership, with the various near-sovereign political bodies constantly bickering and countermanding each other. The only time the FWL can effectively unite is when House Marik, one of the setting's five Great Houses, takes over and forms a military junta. They're the most ethnically/religiously diverse of the Successor States, and are genuinely depicted as rather benign. Still ruled by nobility, and its constituent states range in practices and freedoms of its worlds.

Honestly know the least about this Great House/Successor State, and very little about this military unit. I just liked the color scheme.

Not Warhammer, but I'm hoping the community doesn't care. I didn't want to post to Lemmyworld, because BattleTech community is - like the Warhammer community - plagued with fans that can't see the issues with the franchise.

These are Death Commandos, an elite military unit that are loyal to the Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation. They are canonically very skilled and ruthless pilots, able to conduct secret missions and leave no survivors, be it as infantry or as MechWarriors.

I could (and probably will) make a post about everything I find wrong about the Capellan Confederation in due time, but to summarize: imagine if you combined every negative trait about Nazi Germany (but dial the racism back from "master race and genocide" to "our culture is dominant and people should look and act like us"), the military incompetence of fascist Italy, and the underhanded deception and sinister machinations of the US and UK (particularly the overreliance on deception, proxy wars, war crime-grade weapons, and subterfuge). Now, imagine if you coded the entire faction as Han Chinese/Russian. To top it all off, the leaders are genetically disposed to being insane, and incestuous, and they have a rigid caste system and a violent, evil Thugee cult (the cult the British made up to help justify brutalizing India; it's real in this setting, and members of the Capellan leadership follow it). And they call themselves socialist because centralized economy.

I could write a thesis paper about the Capellan Confederation and what it says about the creators, and the fanbase, but I'll save more ranting for another post. Suffice it to say, it's the biggest hurdle for leftists to enjoy the setting, and given the general libertarian bent of the fandom, that's not surprising. Would love it if more comrades could like it, too. Just like Warhammer: why should rightoids get all the fun?